Everybody's Dummy

Frank Zappa 2: Absolutely Free

2012-01-27T09:16:00.003-05:00

The Mothers had already changed since Freak Out!, having gained dedicated players in the sax and keyboard departments, and bolstering Jimmy Carl Black on drums with the more seasoned Billy Mundi. Absolutely Free was recorded over a four-day stretch, with its release delayed by arguments over the artwork. Frank felt the libretto was necessary to explain each of the elements in the album, each side of which was designated its own “oratorio”. At the very least, being able to read along would not only help people get all the words, but mostly be able to figure out where one song started and another ended without staring at their turntables.
A longtime live staple, “Plastic People” is far removed from its origins as “Louie Louie” with new lyrics. The track is, well, orchestrated, with the kinds of stops and starts (and seemingly improvised interjections) that would become a hallmark of his concerts. (The opening LBJ imitation came a full year before the Electric Flag used it on their first album.) Once that’s out of the way “The Duke Of Prunes” suite comes from an early orchestral composition, here given lyrics that skewer whatever romance might have been conjured by the melody. (To drive it home further, Frank insists on singing along with and thereby goading Ray Collins, who he considered an excellent R&B singer, into self-mockery.) The “Call Any Vegetable” suite follows, twice as long with an even more extended freak-out section pitting Frank’s guitar against Bunk Gardner’s soprano sax. Both contain buried references to Stravinsky, Holst and other composers.
After a side worth of songs about food, side two continues the derision as stated in “Plastic People”. “America Drinks” goes out of its way to be melodic and fight it simultaneously. “Status Back Baby” revives the pimply teenage subject matter from the first album, with some excellent changes, quotes from a pep rally, and a truly fantastic guitar solo. There’s a smooth transition into “Uncle Bernie’s Farm”, the ugliness of the “plasticity” disguised by the vocal delivery. Some overt “conceptual continuity” (the idea put forth that everything Frank Zappa did was connected somehow) appears with “Son Of Suzy Creamcheese”, a rhythmically intricate number. But the one that gets all the attention is “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”. A horror movie disguised as a novelty song, it runs the musical gamut through vaudeville and TV commercials, nailing suburban hypocrisy and suggesting that every so-called pillar of the community harbors unclean thoughts about his daughters. Orchestral instruments play extremely modern music (not unlike what Brian Wilson was trying to do across town with Smile) and everybody gets a chance to weigh in. “America Drinks & Goes Home” presents a catchier version of the song that opened the side, a cocktail piano (and a cash register) tinkling away underneath a vo-de-oh-doh delivery sliding back and forth across the stereo picture as a brawl slowly escalates in the background. (The Stones would end up their next two albums this way, mimicking a band saying good night at the end of a gig.)
Absolutely Free is something of a transitional album; not as directly catchy as Freak Out!, it takes time for the challenging music to take hold. And before too long, he’d moved on to his next big ideas anyway. Of his earliest work, it’s possibly the most overlooked.
In an interesting move that unfortunately didn’t become standard, the CD version of Absolutely Free included the original single versions of “Big Leg Emma” and “Why Don’tcha Do Me Right?” Both pretty harmless, silly songs—though the latter sports a tasty distorto riff towards the end—they provide a break between what used to be sides one and two. It’s one of the few Zappa singles that got appended as bonus tracks.

The Mothers Of Invention Absolutely Free (1967)—3½
1989 Rykodisc reissue: same as 1967, plus 2 extra tracks

Byrds 8: Ballad Of Easy Rider

2012-01-25T07:52:00.001-05:00

Somehow or another—although it’s fairly well documented on Wikipedia—the Byrds had another top 40 hit, this time in their latest evolution as country rockers. It happened to be the theme from a hit movie about a couple of bikers, so their label made sure to use it as the band’s next album’s title as well. (We still think the guy on the cover looks more like Teddy Roosevelt than either Dennis Hopper or Peter Fonda, but that’s just us.)
Ballad Of Easy Rider opens with that song, a two-minute snatch of melody stemming from a single line originally scribbled on a napkin by Bob Dylan. (Roger McGuinn tried to give him writing credit, but Bob refused.) It makes for a good start, but the promise doesn’t last.
Having carried the same lineup for two albums in a row, the song selection is more democratic in who sings what. As with the last album, the second song is about a dog, this time named “Fido”, and the music is a direct copy of the Manfred Mann version of “Quinn The Eskimo”. The bass player sings that, but at least Clarence White gets to sing and blaze on “Oil In My Lamp”. McGuinn’s quivering voice all over “Jack Tarr The Sailor” seems more like a spoof, and “Jesus Is Just Alright” isn’t more than a sketch that the Doobie Brothers would eventually fill out.
The very slow, mournful take on “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”—after all, it wouldn’t be a Byrds album without several Dylan covers, would it?—is pointless for the most part, but there is something in the way “it’s all over now” is repeated every chorus that makes the song so sad. The mood is continued on the even mournful “There Must Be Someone”, and Gene Parsons emerges as a strong singer. “Gunga Din” is pretty and simple, but one needs the liner notes to know what the hell it’s about (touring and prejudice, in case you were really interested). You can just hear Clarence revving up his picking on the fade. McGuinn revives a Woody Guthrie song for “Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)” and wastes valuable plastic on “Armstrong, Aldrin And Collins”, which consists of a countdown and a brief folk-style stanza celebrating the men on the moon.
Since they were the Byrds in name only, maybe it’s not fair to be so rough on them. As it is, Ballad Of Easy Rider is harmless country-rock, but not very notable. The album still has its defenders today, and the expanded CD added a few extras, in addition to some repeats from the box set. The most interesting ones show off the prowess of the players, but there’s yet another Moog experiment that was right to stay in the vaults.

The Byrds Ballad Of Easy Rider (1969)—2
1997 CD reissue: same as 1969, plus 7 extra tracks

Simon & Garfunkel 1: Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.

2012-01-23T07:27:00.002-05:00

But for an odd whim by a hip producer, people may never have heard of Simon & Garfunkel, nor might the artists have recorded anything past this first album. They had had a few prior hits, in the late-‘50s as Tom and Jerry, even getting to appear on American Bandstand. A few years at college kept them busy when stardom failed to happen, and then when the folk music boom hit, the boys were right on top of it.
Armed with an acoustic guitar and sweet harmonies, the Mutt and Jeff of Forest Hills recorded their debut LP over a few weeks in March of 1964, in defiance of the British Invasion threatening the business. Of the twelve songs on Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., five come from the pen of Paul Simon. “Bleecker Street” paints a portrait of that iconic avenue. “Sparrow” is an allegory of some sort, but “He Was My Brother” is more direct, an timely elegy for a Freedom Rider. The title track is a striking departure of the set, a monologue from a cheap apartment, made all the more pretentious by the reference to “pieces of silver”. But it would be “The Sound Of Silence” that would endure, an incredibly poetic piece of work striking for its imagery, Garfunkel’s sweet voice, and Simon’s monotonic bleat.
The rest of the album is a mixed bag that mostly comes across as folk-lite, and it’s no wonder that the album didn’t sell. Perhaps there weren’t a lot of songs for affluent Jewish kids to make commercial, which would explain why such spirituals as “You Can Tell The World” and “Go Tell It On The Mountain” appear, along with an arrangement from a Catholic mass. More direct, if naïve, are “The Sun Is Burning” and “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream”, the latter sporting an ill-advised banjo. And in tribute to the kid from Minnesota, the boys harmonize on “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and even take a stab at “Peggy-O”, which Dylan had included on his first album.
So Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. is a very earnest collection of music that wasn’t about to change the world, but taken in context with what they would eventually achieve, it’s a nice snapshot. It’s certainly pleasant, and in places pretty. Given the dozens of similar records coming out at the time, we’ll leave it to the experts to rule whether these actually were “exciting new sounds in the folk tradition”.

Simon & Garfunkel Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964)—3
2001 CD reissue: same as 1964, plus 3 extra tracks

Crowded House 2: Temple Of Low Men

2012-01-20T06:52:00.001-05:00

The first album by Crowded House deservedly brought singer/songwriter Neil Finn more sales and airplay than anything he’d done with Split Enz. The pressure was on for their follow-up, and the demands common to The Difficult Second Album tower over Temple Of Low Men. He gets right to the heart of the matter on “Mansion In The Slums”, ruminating on the double-edged sword of “success” and its enticements.
The songs fall generally in a minor key, suggesting personal turmoil, particularly on “I Feel Possessed” and “Into Temptation”. (While Neil has now been married to his wife Sharon going on thirty years, perhaps there was some “straying”, shall we say, during his trips around the globe.) Similarly, the sample of someone whispering “I need you… forgive me” at the start of “Kill Eye” only adds to the aural freakshow in the song.
The soaring “When You Come” (despite the suggestive title) and “Never Be The Same” boast aching hooks and fantastic harmonies, taken to an even greater level on the beaten determination to “Love This Life”. The mildly rockabilly “Sister Madly” sports a guitar solo by Richard Thompson in between wordplay designed to confound (“Sister madly waking up the dead/Systematically stepping on my head”). “In The Lowlands” seems to rise out of a rainstorm, with the narrator trying to reach a safe haven from wherever he is. All of which dovetails nicely with “Better Be Home Soon”, rewarding the patient listener with a melody, harmony and organ solo that earn the label “Classic Crowded House”.
With its explorations on temptation, guilt and insecurity, Temple Of Lo Mein (as we like to call it) has a much darker mood all around than the sunny singles from the debut, and could easily repel the casual listener. But that’s unfortunate, as they’d miss out on some great material. At ten tracks and only the slightest extra color from producer Mitchell Froom, it’s a compact gem. The album was not a commercial success, save perhaps “Better Be Home Soon”, and it didn’t help when the band had to make videos for the likes of “Into Temptation”, which pitted Neil’s earnest lyrics against Paul and Nick clowning in the background.

Crowded House Temple Of Low Men (1988)—4

Rolling Stones 36: A Bigger Bang

2012-01-18T06:57:00.001-05:00

The last really solid Stones album was the hodgepodge of Tattoo You, from the days when they put out a new album every year or two. Wavering quality can be forgiven in a tight release schedule, so when eight years—that’s right, eight, the equivalent of two presidential terms—got by between studio albums, one hopes that the old geezers have something worth hearing. Of course, every album since their mid-‘80s hiatus has been heralded with PR to the effect that they’ve “got the old classic sound back”. Each of their last few have admittedly had their moments, while having to sit alongside with Mick’s regular attempts to sound “contemporary”.
On A Bigger Bang, the old bastards do keep it simple, mostly by not being afraid to sound like themselves. Most tricks were supposedly started by the trio of Mick, Keith and Charlie; Ronnie added some guitar after the fact, and any bass not later provided by Darryl Jones was handled by Mick or Keith. For the most part, the album does rock, without any clutter. “Rough Justice”, all two chords of it, was the best choice for a single. “Let Me Down Slow” and “It Won’t Take Long” are just as straightforward, and when they bring in the funk for “Rain Fall Down”, it’s a nice change of pace, despite some of the lyrics (“the bankers are wankers every Thursday night/They just vomit on the ground”. Huh?). The obligatory ballad comes in “Streets Of Love”, and it’s not as bad as it seems. “Back Of My Hand” is an interminable Delta blues number that according to the credits is mostly Mick. Luckily, “She Saw Me Coming” sounds like it was a long of fun to play in the studio. But the lovelorn lyrics of “Biggest Mistake” don’t ring true coming out of Mick’s mouth.
Keith finally sings lead on “This Place Is Empty”; it’s amazing how his voice has improved by taking it easy, though we’d love to know if anyone feels well and truly seduced when he coos “bare your breasts”. “Oh No, Not You Again” (which Charlie joked should have been the album’s title) gives Mick a chance to yell some of the dirty words censored off of earlier albums, but at this late date the shock value is nonexistent. Outside of rocking, “Dangerous Beauty” could either be about a romantic conquest or a public figure. “Laugh, I Nearly Died” slows things down to a sinuous groove that, dare we say, could be right out of 1978. “Sweet Neo Con” got all the attention at the time, with its anti-Bush lyrics. The song itself is decent, with some nice twists, but the recently dubbed Sir Mick really shouldn’t try to be political. (And someone should have mixed out the harmonica soloing through have the song.) The wordy “Look What The Cat Dragged In” pulls out all the rhythmic stops they last touched on “Undercover Of The Night”. It’s odd to hear a man who once extolled the virtues of teenage girls now berating the same; I guess it’s different when they’re your own kids. “Driving Too Fast” keeps up the pace, and Keith gets the last word again on the underwhelming “Infamy” (as in “you got it in for me”; get it?) and there’s that harmonica again.
At over an hour, A Bigger Bang qualifies as another double album that with just the right pruning could have been a solid forty-minute program. It starts well, and it’s not a waste of plastic, but they’ve yet to experience the late-career renaissance that some of their peers have enjoyed. One wonders if they can, or will.

The Rolling Stones A Bigger Bang (2005)—3

Lou Reed 10: Between Thought And Expression

2012-01-16T10:23:00.001-05:00

Now that Lou was making money for another label, his former homes took the opportunity to cash in. Conveniently, RCA and Arista were both under the same corporate umbrella, so compiling a box set was a fairly complication-free process, as long as they only went up to 1986.
Between Thought And Expression gets its title from a Velvet Underground song, and was also the title of a recent collection of Lou’s lyrics in book form. Here it simply traces his solo career from the first album up through Mistrial, with a sampling from each album along the way. This was a big deal in 1992, because many of his lesser-selling albums wouldn’t make it to CD for some time. Even Metal Machine Music is represented, in a 90-second snippet.
Most of the “hits” are here—“Walk On The Wild Side”, “Coney Island Baby”, the live “Sweet Jane”—though such singles as “I Love You Suzanne” and “No Money Down” aren’t. As for rarities, there are only a few: a live version of “Heroin” with Don Cherry on trumpet; a dull rave-up of the national anthem; a couple of early versions of later songs.
Lou was actually involved with compiling the set, and his reticence to open the vaults never jibes with his complaints about how the labels tampered with his work over the years. Here was a perfect opportunity to reveal his original intentions, and he passed.
As an introduction, Between Thought And Expression does the job of most box sets, so it succeeds on that level. But in an era when everybody was getting boxed, its usefulness would soon wane. Those seeking an introduction to the man’s work would have even more compilations to ponder in the racks as time went on.

Lou Reed Between Thought And Expression: The Lou Reed Anthology (1992)—3½

Police 4: Ghost In The Machine

2012-01-13T10:11:00.001-05:00

The Police began to break out of a rut, somewhat, on Ghost In The Machine. For one thing, it had a pronouncable title that wasn’t remotely gibberish. The cover itself was a stark subtle portrait of the band in LED—apparently Sting is the poofy digit in the middle, and the advent of MTV helped perpetuate the idea that his ego was in charge.
But while he may have been running the show, that wasn’t successful for the whole album. Many of the songs are nothing more than one-chord jams based around saxophone riffs. Apparently he’d just taught himself the instrument, so he toots incessantly, all over the album.
Synthesizers play a big role as well, starting with the jumpy “Spirits In The Material World”. “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” was a huge hit, and it’s still an incredibly happy song with just a hint of Caribbean influence. “Invisible Sun” meanders against its meter, but at least we finally hear a guitar. “Hungry For You” has a French subtitle, which is fitting since the song is yelled in that language. “Demolition Man” is a loud jam that was probably more fun to play than it is to listen to, even for six minutes.
Side two starts with another jam, and “Too Much Information” is fittingly crammed with too many saxophones. The same could be said for “Rehumanize Yourself”, but at least the lyrics are clever. “One World (Not Three)” beats the same idea into the ground over a reggae beat. By the time “Ωmegaman” (written by Andy Summers) arrives halfway though the side we’re aching to hear an actual song, with dynamics and everything, and it delivers. “Secret Journey” is something of a throwback to Zenyatta Mondatta, being prefaced by a full minute of guitar synthesizer. Stewart Copeland’s melancholy “Darkness” still manages to keep the album from ending dull.
Outside of “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”, the best songs on the album are the two Sting didn’t write. Taken as a whole, Ghost In The Machine is fairly boring, but that didn’t keep it from becoming a huge hit. Perhaps the tropical climate of the sessions permeated the cold exterior of the album for the majority of consumers.

The Police Ghost In The Machine (1981)—2½

R.E.M. 12: Up

2012-01-11T07:39:00.003-05:00

The boys of R.E.M. didn’t quite make it to their original goal of breaking up at the stroke of midnight on the millennium since drummer Bill Berry quit before they got there. He left on the condition that doing so wouldn’t break up the band, so it was with heavy hearts and not a small amount of pressure that the remaining trio forged ahead with the recording of a new album. And when it’s time to change, you got to rearrange, so they parted with co-producer Scott Litt after ten years and six albums. They even tried to simplify, going back to the one-word title. The packaging also included full lyrics for the first time ever on an R.E.M. album. (Up also arrived with the blessing of Peter Gabriel, who was planning to use the same title for his own album, which wouldn’t surface for another four years.)
Knowing full well that whatever they did next would be under intense scrutiny, they went out of their way not to sound like themselves, relying on lots of wacky sounding (for R.E.M.) keyboards, using primitive old-school synthesizers and programmed drums. Up is full of contradictions, from the hopeful yet unfulfilled prophecy of the album title to the reliance on “old” sounds in order to sound “new”. This is immediately evident on the opener, the very Eno-esque “Airportman”. “Lotus” sounds more like standard R.E.M., with an electric piano with a New Adventures In Hi-Fi vibe. “Suspicion” is long but not boring, which is a plus. One of the most talked about songs was “Hope”, built around a distorted riff that could be described as Eno-esque (we really are going to try to stop using that term) and a lyrical/melodic structure borrowed from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”. The subject matter seems to take place in a hospital. The highlight of the album is “At My Most Beautiful”, their first and best Beach Boys homage, built around a lovely Mike Mills piano piece The melody isn’t much—another cousin of “Hairshirt”, “Radio Song” and “Nightswimming”—but the moment where the harmonies make their chromatic lift proves that they have indeed found a way to make us smile.
Unfortunately the album starts to slide from there. “The Apologist” sports an okay organ part, but the “I’m sorry/so sorry” chorus was done better on Reckoning. There’s a nice Coral sitar effect, but the closing “goodbye” just sounds wrong in the middle of the album. “Sad Professor” adds more guitar for something of a step up and “You’re In The Air” has a nice string part, but by now listeners would be excused for falling asleep. “Walk Unafraid” is a rewrite of both “The Apologist” and “Bang And Blame”, and should have been honed into one better track. “Why Not Smile” gains momentum nicely over harpsichord, and Peter gets to layer a bunch of guitars. “Daysleeper” is a slow “Midnight Cowboy”, but Stipe’s lyrics work best when they’re not so literal. “Diminished” seems a more developed “Country Feedback”, but that’s probably just the pedal steel. A fragment of Stipe singing “I’m Not Over You” on acoustic is unlisted but included in the lyrics. The unsettling “Parakeet” snakes around a haunting prepared piano, and “Falls To Climb” returns the canned Eno-esque synth sound, very sterile and cold. (We really did try, honest.)
Up was a step in the right direction, with their most memorable melodies in a good while. At first listen it seemed an improvement over the autopilot of the last couple of albums, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly. (It’s tough when your first four albums are great, because when you put out something that’s merely “good”, that translates as “not great”.) Low-key but not as autumnal as Automatic For The People, it ultimately makes you want to go back and try to decipher what Bill brought to the table, because he is missed. Maybe he might have helped them cut it down to under an hour, for instance.

R.E.M. Up (1998)—3

Crowded House 1: Crowded House

2012-01-09T09:12:00.002-05:00

As ABBA was to Sweden, so Split Enz was to New Zealand, but without the multi-millions. Most Americans would have heard of the band thanks to MTV, when such songs as “I Got You”, “One Step Ahead” and “History Never Repeats” were in heavy rotation. (In fact, the honors for first-ever MTV world premiere video went to the band’s “Six Months In A Leaky Boat”.) These songs were written and sung by the band’s junior member Neil Finn, and when the band finally split, he formed a new one with a couple of Australians. That was Crowded House, who saw even greater success than their quirkier forefathers, but precious little in the US of A past their first album.
Neil’s pop sensibilities came across as tuneful as McCartney’s, if slightly more neurotic. Crowded House was arguably his show, but he fully relied on the harmonies and humor of Nick Seymour and Paul Hester in the rhythm section. Those who saw the band live insist that their concerts were just plain fun.
Their albums were another matter. With producer Mitchell Froom adding his brand of keyboards to the mix, the band’s style always seemed just a little outside what sold records in America. Their eponymous debut didn’t sell at all until the fourth single release, the exquisite ballad “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, one of the greatest songs of the 20th century. Its simple chords and “hey now” hook gave them a #2 single, and finally convinced people to check out the whole album.
Side one is terrific. “World Where You Live” and “Mean To Me” eventually got airplay, while “Now We’re Getting Somewhere” and “Love You ‘Til The Day I Die” offered two sides of romance with some humor. (We’re pretty sure that’s Paul shrieking the count-in to the latter.) Side two begins with “Something So Strong”, the next big single supported by another wacky video, but the rest of the album isn’t quite as, well, strong. Part of its effectiveness can be ascribed to the times, when glossy synths and horn sections were used to decorate scenery that could have better stood on its own. We’re still not sure why someone’s aunt lies in a “Hole In The River”, though we’re pretty sure that’s not why we should roll back the “Tombstone”. “That’s What I Call Love” has a lot of [production for something that would have been a B-side in another time.
But money talks, and the album sold enough copies to keep their record label interested for a follow-up. As an album, Crowded House may not be their best. But as a collection of singles, it more than delivers. (The current 11-song CD is slightly different from the original 10-track American release, which for some reason moved “Mean To Me” down to the fourth song on the first side; it was the opener elsewhere. Also, a remake of “I Walk Away” from the last Enz album appeared in place of “Can’t Carry On”.)

Crowded House Crowded House (1986)—3

CSN 1: Crosby, Stills & Nash

2012-01-06T07:46:00.001-05:00

The unlikeliest supergroup in an era full of them hit the ground running, and what a wonderful blend it was. David Crosby had been bounced from the Byrds, Stpehen Stills stood in the debris of Buffalo Springfield, and Graham Nash left the Hollies back in England. Despite the equal-ish billing on Crosby, Stills & Nash, it was Stills who ran the show by producing, playing multiple guitars, bass and organ, and writing half of the songs. Luckily he also knew when to let the other two shine on their own.
“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is still their quintessential performance, a basic drop-D strum with harmonies aplenty, tension bolstered by the multiple sections, and not even the Ricky Ricardo detour can deflate it. “Marrakesh Express” could pass for a Simon & Garfunkel song, but “Guinnevere” is pure Crosby, mysterious and spooky. The trio’s blend shines on “You Don’t Have To Cry”, despite consisting of the same verse sung twice. (Crosby oddly calls it “In The Morning When You Rise” in his first autobiography.) Backwards guitar was still in vogue in 1969, so that’s what we hear all over “Pre-Road Downs”. Be sure to hide the roaches indeed.
The band finally, truly rocks on “Wooden Ships”, a vivid apocalyptic vision and excellent dialogue. Nash turns things way, way down for “Lady Of The Island”, and we’re not the first to note the resemblance to Joni Mitchell. “Helplessly Hoping” is a high school poem set to music, an exercise in alliteration that rises above the obvious “one, two, three” effect on the chorus. “Long Time Gone” recaptures the gloomy rock sound, and Crosby finds his inner yodel. That vocal effect appears briefly before “49 Bye-Byes”, one of Stills’ better tracks, building in an excellent crescendo for a fine ending.
Crosby, Stills & Nash has become such a part of the fabric that any summation seems redundant. The fact of the matter is that they got it right, and seemed capable of just about anything. However, the band would struggle to balance the harmonic blend of their music with the ego struggle behind the scenes. We should be happy that they were able to create this.

Crosby, Stills & Nash Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)—4

Badfinger 7: After Pete

2012-01-04T06:04:00.001-05:00

The tragedy of Badfinger has been only slightly redeemed by the recognition that has multiplied in the years since Pete Ham took his own life. For most of the ‘70s and ‘80s, one could still hear at least “No Matter What” and “Come And Get It” on the right radio stations, and even AM radio continued to embrace Nilsson’s version of “Without You”. But thanks to the “businessman” who arguably sent Pete to his early grave, the people responsible for creating that music saw barely a penny for their talent.
The surviving members attempted to carry on in a variety of combinations; Joey Molland and Tom Evans even put out a couple of albums under the Badfinger moniker, but even they couldn’t get along. In 1983, apparently never having gotten over what happened to Pete, Tommy also chose suicide via hanging.
From time to time an act called Badfinger could be found playing a state fair or amusement park; most likely the only original member was Joey (oddly, the last to join the band and first to walk). The Apple catalog remained in legal limbo, but the Warner Bros. material was mined in the CD reissue era. The UK-only Shine On offered eight songs from Badfinger and four from Wish You Were Here, while in the US, Rhino Records went even deeper on the hopefully titled (for 1990) The Best Of Badfinger Volume II, with a more balanced sampling from the two Warner albums, bolstered by four unreleased tracks and two songs from one of the Joey-and-Tommy albums. Joey also spearheaded the audio sweetening and release of Day After Day, a vintage 1974 concert, on Rykodisc.
Once EMI and Apple settled their litigation, Badfinger’s albums were finally made available on CD, along with the requisite bonus material. Meanwhile, an enterprising engineer named Dan Motavina wrote a book about the band, and ingratiated himself so much to the surviving members and estates to include CDs of demos and whatnot with each printing. Rykodisc got into the act with two CDs of Pete Ham demos, shepherded by Motavina, but including dubious (again) overdubs by original Ivey Ron Griffiths and latter-day Badfinger keyboardist Bob Jackson in an attempt to be contemporary yet “authentic”. (Of the two, 7 Park Avenue is more listenable, though Golders Green boasts sketches of songs people would recognize.)
Motavina was also responsible for the 2000 release of Head First, which presented the band’s final recordings with Pete but without Joey. It’s not a happy album; the pressure of having to create so much material had finally taken its toll, and with the exception of the four songs that had already appeared on the Rhino collection, it’s a disappointing epilogue. (The extra CD of demos doesn’t help either.) VH-1’s Behind The Music special appeared the same year, along with a new compilation. The Very Best Of Badfinger gets points for including tracks from the two Warner Bros. albums, but at the expense of some of the better songs on the more solid 1995 compilation simply titled The Best Of Badfinger.
The Apple albums were made available again with the digital relaunch of the catalog in 2010, and the two Warner titles are currently available digitally as well. Today, only Joey Molland is left to reap any rewards. Yet the fact that these albums are in circulation is triumph enough.

Ben Folds 9: Way To Normal

2012-01-02T07:46:00.002-05:00

Ben Folds’ detractors have easy targets for their criticism. He’s either too snarky or wimpy for their tastes; yet at the same time, anyone who hoped he’d do more “funny songs” as he did on the first album by the Five would have a field day with Way To Normal. And those detractors would have plenty of reasons to say “I told you so.”
The opening track, “Hiroshima (B B B Benny Hit His Head)” gets its genesis from an actual falling-down-onstage incident, and outside of the obvious Elton John reference in the title and arrangement, it’s also musically close to “Landed”, which is a better song, and less of a made-up novelty like this. Maybe “Dr. Yang” was the guy who tended to him after the fact, but it’s hard to follow without lyrics. “The Frown Song” makes two wacky sounding songs in a row (because someone bought a Moog) and we’re still waiting for the album to start. The first single, “You Don’t Know Me”, is something of a duet with sensitive breathy female artist du jour Regina Spektor, with an annoying video to match. The “Before Cologne” interlude, however, is just lovely, and we wish there was both more of it, and more like it. “Cologne” itself is sad and pretty.
“Errant Dog” pretty much deflates the somber mood, though it does sounds like a Ben Folds Five outtake. “Free Coffee” is based around the sound of Altoids on piano strings, and that’s the most interesting thing to say about it. There’s an annoying spoken “prelude” to the next track, which only conjures images of The Love Guru. Luckily it’s indexed before the song proper, which explains how the “Bitch Went Nuts”. The high-school vocabulary notwithstanding, the choruses are great. Similarly, “Brainwascht” is a little better than the other “wacky” songs thus far.
“Effington” would inspire an album full of college a cappella songs, stemming from “Please Please Me” cop at the start. The final word comes in “Kylie From Connecticut”, a vague portrait of a failed marriage and a pretty depressing way to go out.
Maybe this was a defiant riposte to the news that he was on his third divorce and fourth wife, but that only put the Songs For Silverman in sharper hindsight. As it is, he takes much too long between albums than fans would prefer, and with Way To Normal he should have worked a little longer on the quality. Most of the songs seem jokey for the sake of being vulgar, and while we like cheap laffs as much as anyone, these don’t work. Coming on the heels of Supersunnyspeedgraphic, The LP, it was even more of a disappointment. What made matters worse is that he purposely leaked “fake” versions of some of the songs before the album’s proper release, most of which were better than the real thing. (Of course, that only torpedoes the argument that he needs time to ensure better output.)
Perhaps to boost interest in the album—or even an acknowledgement that it wasn’t that good—the following year Ben put out an expanded version under the title Stems And Seeds. One disc featured downloadable files of the Way To Normal songs for people to remix in such programs as GarageBand, while the other included an already rejigged version of the album, plus the leaked fakes. If you don’t mind buying the album twice, that’s the way to go, if only because it’s easier than trying to dig up the tracks online.

Ben Folds Way To Normal (2008)—2
Ben Folds Stems And Seeds (2009)—3

Police 3: Zenyatta Mondatta

2011-12-30T09:58:00.000-05:00

The boys recorded their third album very quickly, and Zenyatta Mondatta was both surprisingly good and a surprise hit. While still retaining the white reggae of the first two, they finally began to stretch, bringing in synthesizers for a few tracks.
An automated hum is the first thing we hear as “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” creeps in, along with its famous lyric about a schoolteacher beset by temptation. (At least they appeared to be having fun in the video.) “Driven To Tears” provides something of a political statement, with an amazingly dischordant solo and a tense instrumental section before the final resolution. “When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What's Still Around” immediately follows, giving something of an answer to the questions asked. The reggae reaches ska speed for “Canary In A Coalmine”, a song with high-pitched vocals, thick lyrics and a demand to pogo. “Voices Inside My Head” is virtually a one-chord jam, and we finally hear from another band member on “Bombs Away”, and we notice that Sting tends to overemphasize Stewart Copeland’s melodies.
People often point to “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” as a stupid lyric, but that was the point. As simple as it is, at least it’s got a cool bridge. “Behind My Camel” is a gratingly repetitive instrumental tinged with horror that actually won a Grammy. The beat comes back for “Man In A Suitcase”, but slows way, way down for “Shadows In The Rain”. And it all ends with another confusing instrumental, “The Other Way Of Stopping”.
Though it runs out of steam at the end, there’s a enough good in Zenyatta Mondatta to make it worthy of repeat listens. The band were never quite happy with it, however, and would return to a few of the songs in the future, as we shall soon see.

The Police Zenyatta Mondatta (1980)—3

Byrds 7: Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde

2011-12-28T10:02:00.002-05:00

Somehow The Byrds were still a band with a record deal, and Roger McGuinn felt responsible for keeping the brand going, even after he was the only original member left. Having convinced session pal Clarence White to stick around, they recruited a rhythm section schooled in country music and equally adept at singing harmonies.
As indicated by the schizophrenia in its title, Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde shows Roger McGuinn at a crossroads, trying to find a direction out of the several that interested him, from rock to country to space. But with an eye on safe commercialism, he took all the lead vocals on the album. (After all, what’s the point of keeping the store open if customers don’t recognize the guy behind the counter?)
Another sure stab at preserving the brand came with the opening track, a fuzz-tinged cover of “This Wheel’s On Fire”, yet another Dylan song from the Basement Tapes that consumers would certainly have recognized from the Band’s version the previous year (or even the UK hit by Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger, later redone for the theme song to Absolutely Fabulous, but we’re getting WAY off track here). Whatever menace they’ve laid down is pushed aside for “Old Blue”, the ancient folk song about a dead dog. “Your Gentle Way Of Loving Me” is about as straight Nashville as one can get, though we could do without the constant harmonica in the back. Pushed along by a booming tympani, “Child Of The Universe” was also the closing theme to the hideous Candy, known to most as Ringo Starr’s first film appearance without the other Beatles and to everyone else as one of the worst star-studded movies ever foisted upon the public. The main verse section is interesting in a psychedelic way, but the chorus is held hostage to the booming. (The unused title song sits in the middle of side two, and it’s not much better.) “Nashville West” is an instrumental showcase for Clarence White, which is just fine until somebody yells “YEE-HOO!” and it becomes a parody.
One of the last legacies Gram Parsons left the band was “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man”, a middle finger to everyone in Nashville who’d rejected Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. “King Apathy III” straddles a couple of meters, not sure if it wants to rock or swing, and the sections don’t even fit; maybe that’s supposed to illustrate apathy. “Bad Night At The Whiskey” succeed by standing relatively still, letting its heavy rock beat churn beneath multi-layered harmonies. Unfortunately, they couldn’t leave well enough alone; the closing “medley” crams a verse from “My Back Pages” up against a stiff blues jam ending with “Baby What You Want Me To Do”, concluding with a set-ending “we’ll be right back”.
Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde has its moments, but they simply don’t string together well. If anything, it serves as a statement of determination and perseverance, and Clarence White shines throughout, despite the material. Apparently not much was left over from the album sessions, as the 1997 upgrade sports two tracks from the box set and three negligible alternate takes to those on the album.

The Byrds Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde (1969)—2
1997 CD reissue: same as 1969, plus 5 extra tracks

Big Star 4: In Space

2011-12-26T08:29:00.002-05:00

After a decade of sporadic gigs (fueling continued interested in their tiny catalog) the reconstituted Big Star put out a new album in the middle of the second Bush administration. In Space is a Big Star album in name only, in that the players are the two Posies who joined Alex and Jody in 1993. In fact, Alex does not dominate the proceedings, and on the handful of songs that are certainly his, the sound is more like the schizophrenic R&B of his post-‘70s solo work. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you like that sort of thing.)
The album is frontloaded with a handful of songs that do conjure the spirit of the band as people would like to remember them. “Dony” has a ragged edge and is catchy despite itself. “Lady Sweet” is the Posies version of the sound they’d like to hear. They harmonize with Jody on “Best Chance We’ve Ever Had”, and do a Beach Boys homage for “Turn My Back On The Sun”. Then Alex takes over for six minutes of silly funk in “Love Revolution”, a re-write of “Tighten Up” complete with calls to his “brothers and sisters” and a horn section. Thankfully, the old sound returns to Jody for “February’s Quiet”.
Alex wants the crowd to dance, which is obvious on his delivery of “Mine Exclusively”, a song that pre-dates even the Box Tops. The sound (and attitude) continues of “A Whole New Thing”, which pushes the irony in its beat-combo arrangement. “Aria, Largo” is hamfisted arrangement of a 400-year-old classical piece played on stiff guitar and bored drums. “Hung Up With Summer” sounds like it was recorded immediately afterwards, with a lot of the same guitar tones. “Do You Wanna Make It” is lyrically minimalist, conjuring memories of the Wonders as they toured the country’s finest state fairs. And it all comes to a sloppy end on “Makeover”, a jam with rambling “lyrics” cribbed from beauty ads. (It’s probably Paul Westerberg’s favorite track.)
In Space is not going to satisfy anyone’s dream of a fourth Big Star album, and the jury’s out as to whether anyone would care if not for the brand name on the label. At less than forty minutes, it delivers for about half. The Posies sound thrilled to be involved, but the real joy of the album comes from Jody Stephens, an exceptional and highly underrated rock drummer. His fills never fail to raise an eyebrow.

Big Star In Space (2005)—3

Frank Zappa 1: Freak Out!

2011-12-23T10:58:00.002-05:00

Something to consider about Frank Zappa’s first album is how much of his eventual career can be traced to it. It’s all here: influences from classical and avant-garde to doo-wop, extended guitar solos, “shocking” subject matter, and contempt for his audience, based on the assumption that they only care about commercial fluff and teenage heartbreak. Freak Out! was an incredibly bold debut for its time, as double albums were not common in 1966, even for established artists, and certainly not for a rock band’s debut.
The spine may have credited the album to The Mothers Of Invention, but a glance at the credits make it all too clear that Frank was in charge, especially from his “helpful” liner notes. “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” should have been proof that this wasn’t your average band, even when followed by the kiss-off in “I Ain’t Got No Heart”. “Who Are The Brain Police?” ushers in the weird, questioning authority and fixating on plastic and chrome. “Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder” is greasy doo-wop, and “How Could I Be Such A Fool” less so. “Motherly Love” is a more catchy come-on from the band.
“Wowie Zowie” goes out of its way to be dumb, complete with xylophone. Another trio of “safe songs” attempts to appeal to the masses: “You Didn't Try To Call Me”, “Any Way The Wind Blows” and “I’m Not Satisfied” would have easily made it on radio. But “You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here” deflates it all with a smirk.
The first two sides on their own straddled the way-in and the way-out, but the second disc in the set makes a solid left turn. “Trouble Every Day” is his first major political work, as well as a chance to stretch on the guitar. Then he calls in the rest of the band to get crazy for “Help, I’m A Rock” (and its virtual coda, “It Can’t Happen Here”). The craziness continues for the entirety of side four with a free jam (which Frank always maintained was unfinished) called “Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet”.
Zappa freaks may not agree on everything, but they probably like Freak Out!. It’s generally everyone’s introduction, whether they bought it in 1966 or came across it later. And since Frank was so concerned with continuity and historical context, it’s still a good place to start.
The album’s importance to his estate (a rather controlling outfit called the Zappa Family Trust, or ZFT) was underscored by the release of an archival entity called The MOFO Project/Object, “MOFO” being a handy acronym for “Making Of Freak Out”. Typical of the ZFT, it was available in two configurations, both featuring music not heard on the other, forcing fans to buy both (or procure them by nefarious means). Both featured the “original stereo vinyl mix” of the album on disc one, and filled the balance of space with a variety of basic tracks and vocal takes that illuminate some elements of the instruments and utterances hidden after the original fades. His ability with an Xacto knife shows in the various mixes and edits of “Help I’m A Rock” and “Monster Magnet”, but the outtake “Groupie Bang Bang” would never have passed muster back then; besides being a fairly pedestrian Bo Diddley homage, the lyrics are a little too pointed, but for conceptual continuity purposes, they point the way to both the Flo & Eddie era and one of the subplots of Joe’s Garage. Interview snippets and later mixes fulfill the promise of being an “audio documentary”, while segments of a live performance at the Fillmore Auditorium the week the album came out prove that despite the use of studio musicians, including Carol Kaye on 12-string and various horns and strings on the album proper, the Mothers were actually a decent R&B combo.

The Mothers Of Invention Freak Out! (1966)—4

Lou Reed 9: Magic & Loss

2011-12-21T07:13:00.001-05:00

Following on from the elegy for Andy Warhol, Lou began to be more consumed by thoughts of death. This was nothing new to a man who chronicled drug disasters his entire career, but now people he loved were succumbing to the vagaries of age. The main impetuses for Magic And Loss were songwriter Doc Pomus and someone named Rita. (It has been suggested that the latter was either Rotten Rita, one of the Warhol crowd, or even the infamous Rachel, who’d graced some of his album covers in the ‘70s.) Rob Wasserman (bass) and Mike Rathke (guitar) return from New York, but here the drums are supplied by Michael Blair, who’s better known as a percussionist and a noisy one at that, as evidenced by his work with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello. Still, that minimal approach keeps the sound clean and direct.
“Dorita” provides something of an overture before “What’s Good” provides a litany of observations of life and the lack thereof. “Power And Glory” appears twice—first as a lowkey track featuring the voice of the Legendary Little Jimmy Scott, and again as an out-and-out rocker. Both songs provide strange allegories and the horror at watching the effects of chemotherapy. “Magician” provides something of a contrast, sung from the point of view of the patient. Lou’s perspective returns on “Sword Of Damocles”, but he didn’t figure out what the melody was supposed to be before singing it, which is probably why Billy Corgan thought he could steal it for “Disarm”. “Goodby Mass” is pretty straightforward, capturing the sadness and futility one might feel at a funeral, while “Cremation” is a reiterates the usual metaphors about death.
“Dreamin’” sports one of his better developed melodies, to the point where the simple chorus doesn’t deflate the emotion of the memories within the words. Using all three chords, “No Chance” is another song from the hospital waiting room, but “Warrior King” needs only two chords to wish for the power to choose who lives and who dies. The most striking track is “Harry’s Circumcision”, a black monologue in the vein of “The Gift”, this one detailing a failed suicide. “Gassed And Stoked” takes the music down to one chord with the quickest change to A, only the title doesn’t match with the idea in the lyrics. By the time the title track closes the program, we’re just a little weary.
Lou saw Magic And Loss as a major work, giving each song title a descriptive literary subtitle (“The Thesis”, “Regret”, “Revenge” etc.) and promoting the album with performances of the songs in order. It’s not as catchy as New York, which is understandable considering the subject matter, nor is it a go-to party album, but at the cusp of the grunge era, it stands out as a cerebral effort in an otherwise non-cerebral field.

Lou Reed Magic And Loss (1992)—3

Badfinger 6: Wish You Were Here

2011-12-19T07:41:00.003-05:00

For any other band, the prospect of creating three full-length albums to be released within a twelve-month period would be daunting, if not impossible, but most bands weren’t Badfinger. What’s even more amazing is that not only did they accomplish this Sisyphean feat, but they got better with each new LP.
Wish You Were Here is the peak of a busy period, an album where all cylinders were firing at maximum. It delivers on the power-pop promise of No Dice and Straight Up, without getting too sentimental, and letting Joey Molland shred on lead throughout.
“Just A Chance” is classic Pete Ham, and “Your So Fine” (just one example of their grammatical anarchy) is a catchy Mike Gibbins song sung by Joey, with excellent harmonies. Joey’s concerns with the future of the band drive “Got To Get Out Of Here”. But the one-two punch of shimmering gem “Know One Knows” and the multi-layered “Dennis”—the closest thing to an emotional piano ballad here, sung to a mischievous child—prove that Pete Ham was the living amalgam of Lennon and McCartney. (The final minute-and-a-half is exhilarating, in the way the bass walks over the piano, and subtly mixed harmonies support the lead vocal.)
The band’s skill at combining ideas frames the second side of the album, with a pair of “medleys” unfairly compared to those on Abbey Road. True, “In The Meantime/Some Other Time” does fade in on a discordant orchestra, but soon develops into a driving minor-key rocker. (Credit producer Chris Thomas for the fantastic sound throughout the album.) “Love Time” is a little on the wimpy side for Joey, but at least it’s heartfelt. Tommy’s only real contribution is “King Of The Load (T)”, which sounds like another song we can’t place, is firmly entrenched in the ‘70s by the electric piano, and doesn’t explain what the letter T is for, unless that’s the first initial of the roadie in question. “Meanwhile Back At The Ranch/Should I Smoke” is constructed as a grand finale, with frustrations over the state of the band still managing to convey a sense of triumph over adversity.
So as great as it is, how has this album managed to be so overlooked all these years? Not only was it released a full eight months before the Pink Floyd album of the same name, Wish You Were Here also has the distinction of being pulled from distribution before said Floyd album came out. The wheeling and dealing that had brought the band to Warner Bros. caught up with their crooked management, leaving the boys in the middle with the most to lose. They were already rushed back into the studio to record yet another album, to be titled Head First. And that April, at the magical age of 27, Pete Ham hung himself.

Badfinger Wish You Were Here (1974)—4½

Soft Boys 1: A Can Of Bees

2011-12-16T07:20:00.002-05:00

Unless you were really, really hip in the late ‘70s, chances are you hadn’t heard of The Soft Boys until much later, in the context of being Robyn Hitchcock’s first band, or maybe as the precursor to Katrina & The Waves. At any rate, as their catalog has been reiussed for the third time, a summary is overdue.
Not exactly punk and not yet power-pop, they recorded a few singles and EPs before finally completing their first album, and A Can Of Bees comes across as something of an assault. “Give It To The Soft Boys” and “The Pigworker” are based on slightly atonal riffs and Robyn’s highly unmelodic vocalizing; here’s where the influence of Captain Beefheart is most apparent. “Human Music” is a little more tuneful, beginning with a nice guitar motif and continuing under some Byrdsian harmonies. “Leppo And The Jooves” sounds even more like the Robyn people knew in the ‘80s, if only because the song was featured on Gotta Let This Hen Out!. The stilted rhythms of “The Rat’s Prayer”, unsurprisingly, recall Syd Barrett.
Mostly instrumental, “Do The Chisel” dares you to dance, as does, in its own way, “Return Of The Sacred Crab”. “Sandra’s Having Her Brain Out” manages to straddle about five different sections while insulting feminists. Oddly, three live tracks end the album: a pretty straight cover of John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey”, the frenetic “School Dinner Blues”, and the even faster “Wading Through A Ventilator”.
When taken within context, A Can Of Bees fits neatly inside the Robyn Hitchcock story, but it certainly startles. Since its first appearance the conents have been shuffled a bit, but now that it’s available again on the Yep Roc label, the original 11-song sequnence comes with a download link for nine additional songs from the same period.

The Soft Boys A Can Of Bees (1979)—3
1992 Rykodisc reissue: same as 1979, plus 6 extra tracks
2010 Yep Roc reissue: same as 1979

Tom Waits 13: The Early Years

2011-12-14T07:18:00.004-05:00

There had been something of a lull since “the Island trilogy”, during which Our Hero made a few movies and started some lawsuits but produced precious little music. Meanwhile, his first manager reactivated his old Bizarre label and started licensing things via Rhino Records. That’s how two CDs of early recordings by Tom Waits, which predated even Closing Time, managed to sneak into reputable shops before the artist turned his attorneys on the case like so many rabid dogs. (It may well have been one of the few cases he’s lost, as the music is still in print today.)
These are not all demos, as might be imagined. There’s a band on some of the tracks, but time has lost their names. At this point (1971), he’s sticking to guitar half the time and staying within the confines of the real folk blues. That’s where otherwise lost-to-the ages songs like “Goin’ Down Slow”, “Rockin’ Chair” and “Poncho’s Lament” fit. “Had Me A Girl” was obviously designed to make people in the coffeehouses chuckle, as would the more pointed “I’m Your Late Night Evening Prostitute”, a fairly accurate portrait of the average entertainer.
For familiar fans, it’s interesting to hear “Ice Cream Man” taken at its slower pace, while “Virginia Ave.” and “Midnight Lullabye” come fully formed. The version of “Little Trip To Heaven” is even lovelier than the “official” take, even considering the whistled solo. Historians will gravitate towards the first appearance of a protagonist named Frank, but this is more than likely coincidental. And proof that he was ahead of his time comes in the form of “Looks Like I’m Up Shit Creek Again”.

Whoever compiled these collections put the best tracks on the first volume, as the follow-up, while obviously dictated by sales, grasps at straws. This is illustrated by the preponderance of more familiar song titles. That said, it’s doubtful anyone will gravitate towards these versions of “Ol’ ‘55” or “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You”. “Shiver Me Timbers” hasn’t yet gained the melancholy so heavy. “Mockin’ Bird” has promise, but can’t get past the first two lines. But “So It Goes” puts him firmly in the realm of other New Dylans of the John Prine cloth, and “Diamonds On My Windshield” shows his grasp of beatnik music at this primitive phase. And the appearance of a solo acoustic “Blue Skies” only makes us wish the lush B-side was more readily available.
Taken together, the two volumes of The Early Years provide an alternate view of Tom Waits, showing where he came from. Perhaps he finds these preliminary sketches to be embarrassing—neither are listed on his official website—but really, there’s been a lot worse stuff magnetted to refrigerators over the years.

Tom Waits The Early Years Volume One (1991)—3
Tom Waits The Early Years Vol. 2 (1993)—2½

R.E.M. 11: New Adventures In Hi-Fi

2011-12-12T07:33:00.003-05:00

The band undertook a massive tour in support of their worst album to date, during which three of the four members had to be hospitalized, none of whom were Peter Buck. Still, having enjoyed a long absence for a once heavy-traveled combo, they made the most of their time by recording new songs in dressing rooms and at soundchecks. This method had been deployed in the past to some success by Jackson Browne and Lou Reed, but for New Adventures In Hi-Fi, which arrived just short of a year after Monster, the band was quick to cite hipper references like Radiohead and Neil Young’s Time Fades Away.
At just over an hour, it’s too long for a single album, and too short for a double, suggesting that it should have been trimmed by about a third. The opening track, “How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us” doesn’t live up to its title, and how could it? “The Wake-Up Bomb” returns to the glam sound of Monster, “New Test Leper” doesn’t catch hold, and “Undertow” is a noisy jam with lyrics. “E-Bow The Letter” gets its title from the gizmo Peter Buck uses to get the drone sound on his guitar, and a big deal was made by having their idol Patti Smith bleat over the chorus. Despite its melancholy intro, “Leave” is driven by a persistent siren that wears out its welcome as soon as the vocal starts. Unfortunately, it goes for another six minutes, until you’re sick of the riff too.
Things improve slightly on the second half of the album, beginning with “Departure”. One of the first good tracks, it’s also one of the few songs on the album that evokes the feeling of a band on tour, with its expansive riffing that’s a close cousin to “Me In Honey”, and a chorus not too far removed from one of the extended hooks in ELO’s “Do Ya”. “Bittersweet Me” is also very well developed, and made for a good single, even though people weren’t buying those anymore. Like everything else here, “Be Mine” ends up going a little too long, but rumbles around its basic format with enough muffled vocals to be enticing. “Binky The Doormat” has something of a circus sound to it, fitting for a song supposedly inspired by the movie Shakes The Clown. The “choruses” get louder, with a nice balance of Stipe mumbling his words and Mills repeating “go away”. They’d had some decent instrumentals, on their albums, but “Zither” should have been left as a B-side. “So Fast, So Numb” seems to be more finger-pointing at either the slacker generation or celebrity casualties, and “Low Desert” brings us back to the water-treading of the first part of the album. At least we end on a high point, with the familiar piano sound of “Electrolite”.
New Adventures In Hi-Fi was a valiant effort to start and finish an album quickly, but it’s hardly a triumph. Besides being too long as a whole, half of the tracks break the five-minute mark. Many of the songs sound unfinished, as if Stipe spewed a bunch of lyrics on top of existing jams after the fact. That might have worked for R.E.M. at one time, but it doesn’t always here. However, they were starting to remember how they used to make records, but we had no way of knowing their best work was behind them.

R.E.M. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996)—2½

Badfinger 5: Badfinger

2011-12-09T07:25:00.002-05:00

Having said goodbye to Apple, the label that introduced them to the world at large, Badfinger found themselves shackled to a punishing recording schedule on a new label. While they were eager to do whatever it took to “make it”, they were in the position of having to come up with a brand new album mere months after completing Ass.
Given this background, it’s surprising that Badfinger is as good as it is. It’s evenly balanced between the three main singers, all of whom contribute superior, tuneful tracks. Pete Ham is back in his element, and his songs here are as good as any in his arsenal. “I Miss You” borders on the too sweet, but “Shine On” evokes a Wellie-shod ride through the green hills of the UK. Joey’s “Love Is Easy” fulfills the boogie quotient, and he’s supposedly the subject of “Song For A Lost Friend”, a title that can’t help but be suggestive. A minute of audio-verité bridges “Why Don’t We Talk?”, and the first side closes with “Island”, a toughly played love song from Joey.
Maybe it was because they were trying for a fresh start, but there’s something completely alien about “Matted Spam”, from the title to the prominent horn section. Tommy continues his questioning in “Where Do We Go From Here?”, and with Mike’s excellent “My Heart Goes Out”, it’s obvious that the band was obsessed with the uncertainty in their lives, and justifiably so. But leave it to Pete Ham to take that knotted brow and turn it into something as genuinely loving as “Lonely You”. Joey’s frustration closes the album, first with the slow-burning “Give It Up”, then with the frenetic snapshot of “Andy Norris”.
As good as Badfinger is, it wasn’t going to change their fortunes any. Which is too bad, since it was a decent album. Its limited availability over the years has certainly been a hindrance, and even CD versions have been rare, but it is currently available as a legal download from the usual sources, which should help.

Badfinger Badfinger (1974)—3½

Ben Folds 8: Supersunnyspeedgraphic

2011-12-07T07:27:00.001-05:00

Way back in the lull following the live album, Ben started issuing a series of five-song CD EPs available via direct mail order or digital download, in the spirit of how bands used to put out singles. These were said to be contenders for what would eventually be his next album, but while a few would soon get regular rotation on stage, only one would turn up on his next real album.
Of the three, the first EP is still the most satisfying. Speed Graphic kicks off with a fantastic cover of “In Between Days”, to the point where we think an whole album’s worth of “Ben Plays The Cure” could make that band’s catalog more palatable. “Give Judy My Notice” appears in a piano-and-voice version that’s just as nice as the one that made it to Songs For Silverman. “Protection” has a jazzy, Steely Dan feel; this escalates for “Dog”, mostly notable for the phone conversation with his wife at the end of the song. And “Wandering” is likely to be on anyone’s list of sappy Folds favorites.
Sunny 16 arrived on schedule a few months later. This time the cover was “Songs Of Love” by the Divine Comedy, and the other songs were, well, okay. “There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You” is the upbeat snide song; “You’ve Got To Learn To Live With What You Are” goes for Elton John territory; “All You Can Eat” puts a four-letter word in the chorus for shock effect; and “Rock Star” combines elements of all three.
It was almost a year before Super D completed the trilogy, and it’s the weakest of the series. Maybe the extra time convinced him to save the good stuff for the album proper, so this was merely the leftovers? Two covers frame the set: a faithful recreation of “Get Your Hands Off My Woman” by glam-rockers The Darkness, and a two-year-old live version of “Them That Got” by Ray Charles. “Kalamazoo” wanders along until a “disco string section” interrupts the middle, “Adelaide” seems an odd tribute to the city, while “Rent A Cop” is an obvious joke song.

After finishing the promotion for Silverman, it was time for another stopgap. He did come through somewhat on the original promise by compiling a sampler from the EPs, with the incentive that most were remixed and/or augmented slightly. From the fifteen contenders, Supersunnyspeedgraphic, The LP includes two songs from Speed Graphic, four from Sunny 16 and three from Super D. In addition, one song from his collaboration with Ben Lee and Ben Kweller, a track from his soundtrack to Over The Hedge and best of all, his uniquely melodic cover of Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” round out the set. (He did not, however, include anything 2005’s Songs For Goldfish, a collection of live tracks and oddities released via the same channels as the EPs.) It’s still geared towards diehard fans anyway, most of whom were more excited about a real followup album. And then they could tread water while the next distraction came along.

Ben Folds Speed Graphic (2003)—4
Ben Folds Sunny 16 (2003)—3
Ben Folds Super D (2004)—2½
Ben Folds Songs For Goldfish (2005)—3
Ben Folds Supersunnyspeedgraphic, The LP (2006)—3

Frank Zappa: General Disclaimer

2011-12-06T07:33:00.007-05:00

In the coming weeks, Everybody’s Dummy will begin a series of reviews involving the music of Frank Zappa. In the interests of full disclosure, we submit the following.
I am not a Zappa expert, nor do I pretend to be, nor do I plan to be. There are lots of places on the Interwebs where people can argue about which touring band did the best version of “Pound For A Brown” or whether Scott Thunes isn’t fit to tie Arthur Barrow’s shoes or that the Flo & Eddie years were the best. Prior to his death, my knowledge of the man was limited to:

• a few Saturday Night Live performances;
• the rare occasions when FM radio played a track but it was usually “Valley Girl”, “Dancin’ Fool”, “Joe’s Garage”, “Montana” or “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow”;
• his testimony in Congress during the PMRC hearings; and
• The Real Frank Zappa Book. That said...

I have listened to every commercially-available-through-the-year-2000 Zappa album at least once, and some more than that. This covers everything from Freak Out! past The Yellow Shark up to the Rykodisc releases of Läther and Mystery Disc. Such things became possible when one managed a CD store in a suburban town with a rabid Zappa fan base even before the sad events of December 1993, after which, in an attempt to educate myself, so began the journey. In the process I heard a lot of music I came to love, and a lot that just plain irritated me. Not all of his the best stuff is limited to the early stuff, just as not all of it takes overt detours into shock value and songs about oral and/or anal sex. Some of it is obnoxious crap. Much of it is original and inimitable.
Everybody’s Dummy will not attempt to chronicle each of the 62 or so albums he saw released, nor all 29 and counting of the posthumous vault dispatches thus far. We will, as ever, simply try to put some of these albums and/or collections into perspective for those who, maybe like me back in the mid-‘90s, simply wanted to know what the fuss was about.
So if you’re a Zappa expert (translated: anyone who knows these albums better than I do, which isn’t tough to achieve) and you think I’m full of it, consider the above. And by all means, please comment or complain about any of the posts where you see fit. I’m eager to learn.
If that doesn’t work for you, then consider this dialogue exchange from Uncle Meat:

“I can’t tell when you’re telling the truth—”
“I’m not.”
“How do I know anything you’ve said to me is—”
“You don’t.”

As always, thanks for reading. Hopefully you’ll find it to be an interesting ride. And don’t forget: Music is the best.

Police 2: Reggatta de Blanc

2011-12-05T07:24:00.001-05:00

In keeping with the brand image, the second album by the Police didn’t deviate much from their established standard. However, as often happens with a second album, it’s clear that Reggatta de Blanc required a little more work to be complete. Circumstances dictated that the band be fairly democratic, with several compositions credited to Stewart Copeland and the one-in-all disclaimer “all noises by the Police”.
Despite trawling the clichéd theme of an isolated individual following some kind of disaster, “Message In A Bottle” was catchy enough to be a bit, and added another guitar riff to be passed along like a cherished secret code among listeners. The title track—another made-up foreign-sounding phrase meaning “white reggae” but still conveying a seabound image—is another excellent distillation of the band’s sound, complete with wordless vocals. “It’s Alright For You” retains some of the snottiness from the first album, just as “Bring On The Night” expresses a level of nihilism. Unfortunately, “Deathwish” doesn’t really take off at all.
The promise of the album title is reinforced on side two. “Walking On The Moon” provides another singalong, much more cheerful than “The Bed’s Too Big Without You”. In between there’s “On Any Other Day”, written and sung by the band’s monotonic drummer, and not the last time the band would present a suburban nightmare. He’s also responsible for “Contact”, which is nearly as musically interesting as “Does Everyone Stare”, a truly hidden gem based around a broken-finger piano part. The mix changes in time for a repeat of the first verse, expanding the sound without doubling it. However, the closing “No Time This Time”, while a good tune, deserves a better vocal than it got.
There’s enough quality on Reggatta de Blanc to make it worthwhile as a whole, but the Police were basically treading water. Some stretching would be necessary for the band to keep from repeating themselves.

The Police Reggatta de Blanc (1979)—3

Badfinger 4: Ass

2011-12-02T06:59:00.001-05:00

Outside of the former Beatles (and Yoko Ono), Badfinger stayed on Apple Records longer than anyone else. Their loyalty even extended to recording at the Apple Studio in the basement of 3 Savile Row, something only George bothered to do in the ‘70s.
Of the band, Pete Ham was always the most loyal, and he wears his emotion on the sleeve of “Apple Of My Eye”, the sweetly sad farewell that opens Ass and would be the last non-Beatle single on the label. It’s a promising start to an ultimately disjointed album, pulled together from several sessions and one where Joey Molland dominates. The most rockin’ member of the group, his contributions lean toward heavier sounds and plenty of lead guitars, right out front on “Constitution”. “Get Away” and “The Winner” are rather pedestrian boogie numbers with lazy lyrics, but “Icicles” stands out with its infectious melody and anachronistic backwards guitar. Oddly, “I Can Love You” sounds more like the type of song Pete Ham would write; Pete’s only other contribution is the moody “Timeless”, which builds slowly from a piano piece to a grand finale along the lines of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”.
Tom Evans is equally quiet on the album, but his two contributions are gems. “Blind Owl” is a toe-tapping rocker made for the stage, while “When I Say” is as sweet as any of his love songs. Somehow Mike Gibbins got to add a song, but any chance “Cowboy” had is sunk by the annoying wobble-board sound effect in the front of the mix, and the square-dance asides in the break.
Led away by the giant carrot on the cover, Badfinger would resurface soon enough. But that’s another chapter in their sad story. Ass is merely adequate, overlooked upon release and usually only mentioned in passing. It only got limited release on CD in the ‘90s, with only one bonus track but thorough liner notes. (The 2010 reissue included more outtakes, plus others made available for download-only.)

Badfinger Ass (1973)—3
1996 CD reissue: same as 1973, plus 1 extra track
2010 CD reissue: same as 1973, plus 5 extra tracks

Lou Reed 8: Songs For Drella

2011-11-30T07:35:00.002-05:00

Lou was on a career high with New York from the year before, so a reunion with John Cale was certain to get attention. The excuse was a piece commissioned to celebrate the life of Andy Warhol, so they jumped at it. Songs For Drella got excellent reviews from the usual arty quarters, but would it translate to an album? More to the point, how would it be received as a Lou album, since Cale wasn’t exactly a sales magnet?
The album is a song cycle, mostly sung from “Andy’s” point of view. He starts out trying to escape his “Small Town”, then going to The Big City to establish an “Open House” policy. “Style It Takes” is sung by John, with sympathetic vocals from Lou at the very end, and it’s one of the more successful descriptions of Andy’s approach. The two of them battle on guitar and piano to demonstrate “Work”, wherein Lou recounts some of their conversations. “Trouble With Classicists” frames a quiet rant, and Lou follows it with the more obvious “Starlight”, wherein he delivers an intensity we wouldn’t expect from Andy. “Faces And Names” is much quieter, and we’re starting to think John understood Andy better than Lou.
Indeed, “Images” is relentless, to express the idea of repetition, but “Slip Away” (helpfully subtitled “A Warning”) demonstrates the foreboding that is explained away in “It Wasn’t Me”, where the blame is pushed to others. Something of a plot arrives in “I Believe”, a fairly frank description of Andy getting shot (an event overshadowed in the news by the same thing happening to Bobby Kennedy). This is also where Lou’s guilt over not visiting him in the hospital begins to dominate the lyrics. “Nobody But You” features Lou on acoustic for the first time in a long while, but it’s a three-chord song with Cale playing a percolating bassline on the keyboard. The abrubt ending is an excellent a setup for “A Dream”, a monologue composed by Lou and recited by John in an emulation of Andy’s infamous diaries. This piece is mesmerizing, as the longer it goes the more it perfectly expresses his perceived loneliness, particularly in his anger at Lou. The despair intensifies as the piece comes to a close, so it’s a jarring switch to “Forever Changed”, based around the metaphor of a train, one that actually appears to slow down at the song’s end. After all that, “Hello It’s Me” seems more like the kind of song that would sit by itself on an album. Some of the rhymes seem a little forced, but the closing “goodbye Andy” never fails to catch in your throat.
The idea of these two guys working together for the first time in over twenty years was very enticing, and Songs For Drella delivers very stark listening, with a few great songs amidst some real cringers. But if you’re expecting a Velvet Underground album, you’ll be disappointed. It really is an art piece, conceived as a theater presentation. It’s the sound of a guy with a guitar looking at a guy on keyboards talking about a guy they knew. Lou gets to shred here and there, but even he knows that his chops are merely window dressing to Cale’s fingers. It’s a curio, not likely to be appreciated outside the fan base. (To appeal to them a limited edition was packaged like a jewel case-sized book with a fuzzy cover. Like velvet. Get it?) At least Lou lost the mullet in the process.

Lou Reed & John Cale Songs For Drella (1990)—3½

Flying Burrito Brothers 1: The Gilded Palace Of Sin

2011-11-28T07:21:00.001-05:00

Gram Parsons was only in the “new” Byrds long enough to spearhead the recording of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. Even before that album was released, he had left the band, soon to be followed by Chris Hillman, and together they formed the Flying Burrito Brothers.
This outfit expanded on the country tendencies of the Byrds by infusing it with a distinct rock sound, best summed up by the fuzz tone used by pedal steel guitarist “Sneeky Pete” Kleinow, which cuts through even the corniest tracks like a saw. On top of it all, Parsons and Hillman croon like the Everly Brothers. This blend appears at the top of The Gilded Palace Of Sin on “Christine’s Tune” (later retitled “Devil In Disguise”).
Their approach to country was anything but orthodox, as even the straighter sounding songs can be deceptive. The wonderfully melodic “Sin City” skewers the LA music scene, while the jaunty “My Uncle” concerns draft evasion while a mandolin trills away. “Wheels” and “Juanita” celebrate, respectively, the open road and the redemption of a teenage girl. “Do You Know How It Feels?” is relatively straight, setting us up for the closing, slightly surreal monologue about a “Hippie Boy”, complete with a chorus of “Peace In The Valley”.
Each side gets its own unique centerpiece as well. On the first, there’s a pair of Memphis R&B covers, “Do Right Woman” and “The Dark End Of The Street”, which had been hits just a few years before and would later feature in The Commitments. Side two has two songs that were apparently written so fast that they barely got titles. “Hot Burrito #1” is a lovelorn lament later claimed by Elvis Costello as “I’m Your Toy”. “Hot Burrito #2” isn’t as easy to sum up except for the insistence on love and the exasperated “Jesus Christ!” at the end of each chorus.
The Gilded Palace Of Sin is one of those albums that gets better with each listen, coming across as so effortless and easy. And as with most things involving Gram Parsons, it wouldn’t last.

The Flying Burrito Brothers The Gilded Palace Of Sin (1969)—4

Big Star 3: Live and Columbia

2011-11-25T06:30:00.004-05:00

While Big Star wasn’t well known in their time, those that had experienced them firsthand generally agreed that their few live performances weren’t exactly stellar. But when the band became trendy in the early ‘90s, Rykodisc managed to pad their catalog with a live performance recorded by a Long Island radio station two months after Radio City was released, and after bass player Andy Hummel had quit.
Live presents the band, now reduced to a power trio with an unfamiliar bass player, plowing through two short sets of songs from their two albums, stopping halfway through for a quick interview and an acoustic set by Alex Chilton. The fluctuating levels inherent in most radio studio performances can be distracting, making the band sound even shakier than they already are. Alex is still depending on the same Strat tone he used all over Radio City, but he does a good job of covering all the guitar parts while straining to hit some of Chris Bell’s high notes. His disdain for the record business is apparent in both his between-song comments and the interview, and he gives the most of himself in a cover of Loudon Wainwright III’s groupie anthem “Motel Blues”.
While not as essential as their studio albums, people clamoring for anything from Big Star were happy to ingest Live, as it was the only official record of the band (well, part of them, anyway) in concert. That would change.

Just in time to ride the nostalgic wave, a couple of enterprising organizers of a college “springfest” managed to convince the touring Alex to bring drummer Jody Stephens to the gig, supplemented by two of the Posies, who were one of the grunge era’s most devout Big Star disciples. Released within six months of this “reunion show”, which took place in the afternoon and in a tent, Columbia is nearly as sloppy as the other live album, but the energy coming from the Posies (who likely knew the songs backwards and forwards) makes for one hot recording. It’s hard to tell which guitar is which, since both go awry at one point or another, but Jody is positively solid behind his kit, as well as on the two songs he sings. The Posies handle some of the tougher vocals, along with a reverent “I Am The Cosmos” in honor of Chris. A couple of songs from Third add variety, as well as a couple of standby covers from the old days, T. Rex’s “Baby Strange” and Todd Rundgren’s “Slut”.
Alex would continue to release the occasional quirky solo album, and reunite with the Box Tops a few times. Jody Stephens went back to managing Ardent Studios and playing the occasional session for the likes of Matthew Sweet (signed to the same label that released Columbia) and Golden Smog. And from time to time, they’d call the guys from the Posies and play a few shows as Big Star. So although it wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime event, Columbia makes for a neat souvenir.

Big Star Live (1992)—3
Big Star Columbia: Live at Missouri University 4/25/93 (1993)—3½

Police 1: Outlandos d’Amour

2011-11-23T08:23:00.002-05:00

The Police were an odd lot, even for a power trio. American drummer Stewart Copeland and a singer/bassist named Sting seemed to stand much taller than guitarist Andy Summers, who’s about ten years older than the other two. All three came from jazz fusion backgrounds, but the times dictated a punk attitude and approach. That’s one reason why Outlandos d’Amour has something of a DIY vibe, in the cover art anyway.
The music isn’t that complicated either, even given the members’ prog-rock credentials. “Next To You” is tailor-made for pogoing, before “So Lonely” veers between a reggae verse and double-time chorus. With Sting’s high-pitched vocal and those odd guitar chords, “Roxanne” was likely most people’s introduction to the band. “Hole In My Life” and “Can’t Stand Losing You” became anthems for lovelorn kids everywhere.
One thing that comes to mind listening to the album after all these years—after Sting spent all that time being concerned about rainforests and whatnot—was that the Police once recorded “silly” songs. The Sting we know today would never have a song like “Peanuts” on one of his solo albums, much less sing it. In that light, songs like “Truth Hits Everybody” and even “Born In The 50s” gave them the image of a smart band. Such a label is hard to stick in light of “Be My Girl – Sally”, in which a simple pop chant frames the nursery rhyme-style ode to a blowup doll. (The novelty gets thinner considering that Roxy Music had already covered that subject five years earlier.)
While the band would evolve over time, much of their typical sound is in place on Outlandos d’Amour, almost encapsulated by “Masoko Tanga”, a near-instrumental jam for slashing guitar, melodic bass, reggae-tinged drums and nonsense vocals. Because of its quality and simplicity, it’s still a fine debut, and a nice diversion from some of the comparatively heavier things to come from the band.

The Police Outlandos d’Amour (1978)—3½

Peter Gabriel 13: New Blood

2011-11-21T07:11:00.002-05:00

Now things were starting to get a little out of control. Having enjoyed the kudos for Scratch My Back, Peter got the idea to extend the orchestral remake approach to—wait for it—his own songs. This was hardly a new concept, for people as widespread as Sting and Spinal Tap had gone this route, and it was a worrying trend when once-vital performers saw the remake idea as fresh. The fact of the matter was that they simply couldn’t be bothered write a new album’s worth of tunes. Or maybe it’s the fault of the generation who put them on the map, who’d grown up to be wary of anything unfamiliar.
At any rate, and as might be expected, New Blood is exceptionally concocted, with great care given to both the new arrangements and capturing the sound. It’s an album for diehard fans, who will likely get much more out of it than the casual listener. Some of the tracks actually provide a new perspective; “San Jacinto” in particular is given a sweeping arrangement with a chilly piano intro, and moves smoothly into its own coda. Without its booming drums, “Intruder” is very different, and scarier. “Darkness” is just as unsettling in this format too. Two songs from his Millennial Ovo project might spur interest in that obscure CD, even though one is an instrumental (and a lovely one at that).
But much of the album comes off more like background music. Most of “Rhythm Of The Heat” isn’t that different from the song, until the big climax happens, sounding less like a tribal ritual than a movie soundtrack. “In Your Eyes” is much too urgent, and comes off like a stalker. “Red Rain” is given a brass-heavy treatment that misses on the tension, and “Don’t Give Up” is sung with a woman who trills like a cartoon bird. (He duets with his daughter Melanie on two other tracks for a superior blend. A “bonus” rendition of “Solsbury Hill” is preceded by five minutes of ambient sound actually recorded on location, which is a great idea until if you like listening to wind blowing.
New Blood is certainly harmless, but it’s just a shame that so much time was put into something that still comes off as a distraction. In fact, a disc of the tracks without any vocals included in the “deluxe edition” is almost preferable, as some of the pieces work best that way, like “Mercy Street”; otherwise that song isn’t any more riveting than the original version.

Peter Gabriel New Blood (2011)—3

Badfinger 3: Straight Up

2011-11-18T07:25:00.002-05:00

Perhaps it’s because he didn’t live long enough for people to say otherwise, but the general consensus is that Pete Ham was a pretty nice guy. Maybe too nice, since history has shown that you’ve pretty much gotta be something of a prick to make it in the music business.
His image has always been that of an extremely talented man who loved making music, and loyal to a fault. These qualities are best exhibited by the opening track on Straight Up, “Take It All”. The song came about after the Concert for Bangla Desh; Badfinger was part of the onstage band, strumming along on acoustics and percussion. Then, when George Harrison stepped forward to play “Here Comes The Sun”, he asked Pete to play the song alongside him. Apparently Tom and Joey (incidentally, both Liverpudlians) were extremely jealous that Pete got his own moment in the spotlight, and gave him crap for it. Pete’s response was “Take It All”, an absolutely gracious statement, free of ego. It’s a wonderful song, and just another moment that makes his story so heartbreaking.
It’s also a great opener for a fantastic album. Straight Up had a difficult birth, starting with a pile of scrapped sessions, continuing with George Harrison as producer. When the Concert for Bangla Desh took up his time, the album was completed with Todd Rundgren. There’s not a clunker in the set. It goes right from “Take It All” to the power pop classic “Baby Blue” and its wonderful interlocking guitars. A mini-suite of “Money” and “Flying” displays their talent for piecing together fragments into a cohesive production. “I’d Die Babe” is sneakily Beatlesque, and the majestic “Name Of The Game” gets a big sound out of only a few instruments, with Pete’s simple piano solo buried in the mix before the fade.
Joey dominates the credits on side two with three excellent songs, depicting life on the road in “Suitcase”, fingerpicking folk on “Sweet Tuesday Morning” and straight up rock on “Sometimes”. Pete’s “Perfection” and Tommy’s “It’s Over” show off the band’s versatility, but the real centerpiece is “Day After Day”, another Pete Ham masterpiece, right down to the angelic harmonies, twin slide leads and nice piano touches from Leon Russell.
Reviews of Straight Up were mixed at the time, which is astounding considering that the same album led several wish lists until its eventual CD release in the ‘90s. The new power pop generation could finally hear the roots of Teenage Fanclub and Jellyfish in pristine quality, and the band gained even more overdue praise. Even the requisite bonus tracks were interesting, including some early alternate takes and the shimmering single mix of “Baby Blue”. Some of those bonuses were carried over to the next CD, while others were relegated to download-only status in favor of other outtakes. Taken all together, it’s now possible to compile the earlier version of the album, and it’s clear that redoing it was the smart move. Straight Up was a four-star album when we began typing this, but has since been upgraded. Justifiably.

Badfinger Straight Up (1972)—5
1993 CD reissue: same as 1972, plus 6 extra tracks
2010 CD reissue: same as 1972, plus 6 extra tracks

Rolling Stones 35: Live Licks

2011-11-16T07:15:00.002-05:00

In an amazing turn of events, the Stones broke pattern somewhat by issuing a live album as a follow-up to a hits collection, which itself had followed a live album! They’re nothing if not innovative.
Live Licks gets its title from the tour supporting the Forty Licks collection, and it’s to their credit that it’s not simply all the songs from that album played live. That would be silly, of course. They only pulled that trick for the first disc, which serves up eleven of their Classic Rock radio staples, the newest of which was over twenty years old, with the key addition of Sheryl Crow on “Honky Tonk Women”. (We’ll pause while you try to contain your excitement.) And the man who said he wouldn’t be singing “Satisfaction” in his forties is doing it at 60.
The second disc is slightly more interesting, with three—three!—solo vocals by Keith, some deeper catalog selections, a few choice covers and a guest appearance by the gargantuan legend Solomon Burke on “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love”, to which most people will respond, “Hey, they’re doing a Blues Brothers song.” It’s still the more interesting of the two discs.
Live Licks sounds good, of course, with technology helping Chuck Leavell and Bobby Keys replicate the sounds of the records. The boys sound great and the band is tight. But by now we’ve been used to seeing the “post-production” credit in the liner notes of a live Stones album, so who knows how much tweaking happened between the performances and the CD pressing? It remains just another souvenir, and one that certainly wasn’t purchased by everyone who’d bought a ticket on this crazy 14-month tour. If you were there, you probably had a great time. If not, the excitement doesn’t likely surface.
And what’s a Stones album without a little controversy? To ensure their stature as the world’s favorite dirty old men next to Hugh Hefner, Live Licks was released in some of the more liberated countries worldwide with an uncensored cover, showing the lovely lady riding the tongue topless. In the US we were left to wonder what was under the bikini. Hot-cha!

Rolling Stones Live Licks (2004)—3

Willis Alan Ramsey: Willis Alan Ramsey

2011-11-14T07:55:00.002-05:00

Considering the billions of albums that have been released over the years, it’s safe to say that the ones that have endured and sustained the artists’ careers are in the minority, while the rest have languished in obscurity since their release. Of that majority are performers that came and went, sometimes achieving one-hit wonder status and currently residing in the “where are they now” file.
Some of those one-hit wonders are due to external circumstances; Jeff Buckley only had one album out before he drowned, while Robert Johnson was already dead before anyone had heard of him. There’s the hypothesis that if Elvis Presley had disappeared after only recording the Sun sessions, we’d be talking of him in much different tones today.
Then there’s Willis Alan Ramsey, a Texas singer-songwriter who recorded exactly one eponymous album nearly forty years ago, and hasn’t been in much of a rush to do another one, despite continual rumors and pleas.
The album straddles the lines between country, folk and bluegrass; you can hear Leon Russell (who plays on the album and signed him to his Shelter label) in his twangy croon, and Lyle Lovett (who idolized him and eventually collaborated with him) in his alternately wry and tender songwriting.
“Ballad Of Spider John” follows the tradition of “young guy writing as an old man” while staying original. “Muskrat Candlelight” likely kept him flush for several years, thanks to the hit versions by America and Captain & Tennille. It doesn’t induce as much wincing here, with a nice touch on the vibraphone. The jaunty “Geraldine And The Honeybee” and “Wishbone” simmer with Okie charm, followed up by “Satin Sheets”, sly and ironic considering his eventual shunning of the spotlight (best line: “Praise the Lord and pass the mescaline”). But “Goodbye Old Missoula” is the one you’ll be humming long after the side ends.
Side two is more overtly country, with the fiddle sawing through “Painted Lady”, the swampy “Watermelon Man” and the tribute to Woody Guthrie in “Boy From Oklahoma”. The super-sweet “Angel Eyes” is probably the best song ever written with that title, and to leave things on a high note, “Northeast Texas Women” puts you amidst a front porch hoe-down.
A track-by-track synopsis doesn’t suffice here, mostly because we feel we haven’t been able to do them justice. Each of the songs are striking in their own way, and Willis Alan Ramsey remains an album that any singer-songwriter would be proud of were it the only physical evidence of their work.

Willis Alan Ramsey Willis Alan Ramsey (1972)—4

Byrds 6: Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

2011-11-11T07:15:00.001-05:00

The original Byrds were now down to two: McGuinn and Hillman. Still saddled with a record contract, they regrouped with a couple of new members and some grand ideas. Instead, they followed with the post-psychedelic hangover of 1968 by going back to basics. Anchored by multi-instrumentalist trust fund brat Gram Parsons, the band more or less invented country-rock with Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.
Neither veteran brought an original composition to the album, but being the Byrds, they do frame the set with two Bob Dylan songs (“You Aint’ Goin’ Nowhere” and “Nothing Was Delivered”) recently unearthed from the Basement Tapes. The rest are straight arrangements of traditional songs, bluegrass favorites and even an R&B cover, a wonderfully pretty “You Don’t Miss Your Water”. Throughout, the songs are colored by rolling piano, banjo, pedal steel guitar and not a single Rickenbacker. McGuinn still took center stage as the leader, and even without his old granny glasses he could still carry a tune—so much so that for either legal or personal reasons he overdubbed his lead vocal on a few tracks that were originally cut with Gram Parsons singing.
That Parsons guy tended to make a pretty big impression on everyone he met; supposedly he was the one who turned the Byrds ship into this particular harbor. “You’re Still On My Mind” is a good drinkin’ song, and “Life In Prison” fits the same stereotype. His best moments on the album are on his own songs; “Hickory Wind” and “One Hundred Years From Now” (even sung by McGuinn) became immediate genre classics. And although mostly relegated to bass and mandolin duties, Hillman indulges his bluegrass roots with strongly sung performances of “I Am A Pilgrim” and “Blue Canadian Rockies”.
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo was not an immediate hit, but became a touchstone once more rock musicians began incorporating country sounds into their work. Its importance in the history of the Byrds was underscored by the inclusion of the original Gram Parsons vocals on the three songs McGuinn tinkered with on the band’s 1990 box set. It’s also the only one of their albums to be given its own “deluxe” expansion past a single CD. The Legacy Edition includes the three Parsons vocals originally featured on the box set, along with the standard outtakes, a bunch of early Parsons tracks and a whole pile of rehersal takes on a second disc, but ignores five of the bonus rehearsals on the 1997 CD, so completists have to have both.
The album does show something of a progression through their first five, and while the Byrds continued as a band for another five years, they really weren’t the same band. Only Roger McGuinn was left, and he built a new unit around the amazing speedy picking of a kid named Clarence White. There would be some definite highlights over the next handful of albums—“Ballad Of Easy Rider” and “Chestnut Mare” to name two—and they still maintained a rabid fan base, but people seeking the jingle-jangle sound of the original band would be disappointed. (Besides, David Crosby was doing pretty well with his new friends anyway.)

The Byrds Sweetheart Of The Rodeo (1968)—4
1997 CD reissue: same as 1968, plus 8 extra tracks
2003 Legacy Edition: same as 1967, plus 28 extra tracks

Badfinger 2: No Dice

2011-11-09T09:08:00.000-05:00

Having added the photogenic Joey Molland on lead guitar, Badfinger became a rock band (as opposed to a pop group). They weren’t able to escape the Beatle comparisons, especially being the only rock band on the Apple label, which had to promote No Dice alongside the other five Beatle solo projects that had been released in 1970. It also didn’t help when one of their songs was called “Love Me Do”, and another is a dead ringer for “Oh! Darling”.
But they do benefit from the jolt of electricity, with “I Can’t Take It” leaping from the speakers, and the stellar power pop of “No Matter What”, one of the greatest rock songs of all time, as the first single. “Better Days” chugs along amid an excellent guitar frame, and “Watford John” is a rollicking boogie-woogie.
Pete Ham starts to emerge as the hidden genius in the band, thanks to the sentimental “Midnight Caller” and the verse portion of “Without You”; the chorus was added by Tom Evans, and soon became a worldwide hit in a syrupy arrangement under Harry Nilsson’s added ache. “Blodwyn” is a nice dose of Welsh folk, and “We’re For The Dark” gets a touch of strings to help it along. Not to be outdone, drummer Mike Gibbins was responsible for the riveting “It Had To Be”.
No Dice is a decent album, and holds together as one, which is why it gets an edge in its rating. It was a moderate hit as well, partially from the Beatle connection and mostly because of “No Matter What”, and was one of the most anticipated reissues of the initial CD era. Of course, only one of the bonus tracks on that ended up on the 2010 CD, but that doesn’t detract from the quality of the 12-track album proper.

Badfinger No Dice (1970)—3½
1992 CD reissue: same as 1970, plus 5 extra tracks
2010 CD reissue: same as 1970, plus 5 extra tracks

Ben Folds 7: Songs For Silverman

2011-11-07T07:23:00.002-05:00

It was a longish time before his second solo album. There had been a few EPs (which we’ll get to soon enough), a live album and a project for William Shatner, but a real Ben Folds album gained the stature of a grand statement in its absence. To make things even wackier, there was a core band of bass and drums on every track. So why had the Five disbanded if that was Ben’s preferred sound?
Most of the Songs For Silverman veer towards the more serious side, as opposed to the snarky geek rock that had been his hallmark for the previous decade. He gets most of the comedy out of the way early; “Bastard” might have been a self-portrait, if not a more biting portrait of Stan from the last album. Its trips through various time signatures keep you guessing. “You To Thank” is another biting portrait, this time of a marriage that perhaps shouldn’t have been celebrated. A trip through America’s heartland inspired “Jesusland”, which he soon performed with an “arena rock” arrangement on tour, but that only distracted from the song’s message, as wonderful as the sound was. The Elton John homage “Landed” is a good barometer for the sound of this album; it even had a mix with Paul Buckmaster strings to support the “Levon”-style piano approach. One of his best songs, it’s basically a phone call from someone who’s just escaped a stifling relationship. Before things get too heavy, he sings “Gracie” for his daughter, a charming lullabye with a childlike hook.
The anti-love songs continue with “Trusted”, a blunt portrait of division, and “Give Judy My Notice” a gorgeous kiss-off. “Late” is a tribute to recently deceased songwriter Elliot Smith, and works only because of that knowledge. The remainder of the album is dedicated to some very vague songs, thick with possibility of interpretation. “Sentimental Guy” is a slight self-portrait (maybe) and “Time” gets a boost from lovely harmonies, including the voice of one Al Yankovic. The big enigma is “Prison Food”, with lyrics presumably about another impending breakup without illuminating the title; here the harmonies on the bridge resemble those of Pink Floyd (thanks to his British drummer).
Songs For Silverman takes a while to sink in, and as good as some of the individual tracks are, it does work best as a whole. Hindsight has explained a lot, as despite the loving dedication and photos of the woman, Ben was on the verge of divorcing his third(!) wife. This knowledge only makes the subject matter more uncomfortable to consider, but it’s doubtful he was trying to make his own Blood On The Tracks or Here, My Dear.

Ben Folds Songs For Silverman (2005)—3½

Tom Waits 12: Big Time

2011-11-04T06:53:00.004-04:00

Despite the theatrical genesis of Franks Wild Years, it was never made into a narrative movie. Instead, Tom’s tour behind the album was filmed and cut with a few performance art pieces, and released as Big Time. With the band basically crowded around the industrial light bulb hung from his mike stand, it makes for a straining watch.
At least the music is entertaining. A smattering of selections were included on the companion soundtrack album, and provides a nice sampler of songs culled mostly from his Island tenure. In the live format, Tom’s able to emote a little more, giving some life to things like “Way Down In The Hole”, while infusing “Cold Cold Ground” and “Time” with the tenderness they deserve. Even with its jokey non sequitir prelude, “Train Song” is just as sad as its album version.
There are some departures to keep things interesting. “Red Shoes” is rescued from ‘70s obscurity, and “Strange Weather” makes its Waits debut, having already been covered by Marianne Faithfull, deep into her own Kurt Weill phase. “Falling Down” is a studio recording; nearly a pop song, we can’t help wondering if the demolished hotel mentioned in the lyrics is a reference to his old home in the Tropicana. “Telephone Call From Istanbul” is sped up, and runs away from the chorus to quote “Chantilly Lace”. Throughout, his crackerjack junkyard ensemble keeps up with his every spit and gargle.
It’s not the best representation of a Waits concert, but given that he was about to take a ten-year sabbatical from the stage, Big Time had to suffice.

Tom Waits Big Time (1988)—3
1988 CD version: same as LP, plus 6 extra tracks

Van Morrison 4: Tupelo Honey

2011-11-02T08:57:00.001-04:00

Life in the sticks was certainly agreeing with Van, based on the sunny, bucolic photos adorning the sleeve of Tupelo Honey. Here we see the country squire, long-haired, bearded and developing a gut, wandering along wooded lanes with horses, his lady and a cat.
His R&B approach gets a little country color, thanks to the occasional appearance of a pedal steel guitar, but it still has to cut through the Caledonia soul. “Wild Night” was the big hit, with its percolating bass line, but it’s “Straight To Your Heart (Like A Cannonball)” that grabs your ears. “Old Old Woodstock” and “Starting A New Life” celebrate home and family, and “You’re My Woman” is an overt love song, building from basic verses to the repetitive cadences that would pepper his live performances.
The lovely title track is a high point, and it’s a credit to its simplicity that we only just noticed that it’s melodically identical to “Crazy Love” from Moondance (Van’s “conceptual continuity” rivaling that of Frank Zappa). “I Wanna Roo You (Scottish Derivative)” is even happier still, while “When That Evening Sun Goes Down” manages to distill Nashville Skyline into three minutes. There’s even something of an epic finale in “Moonshine Whiskey”, which alternates between a barn dance waltz and an uptempo jig, revving up for the big finish.
Listening to the album, one doesn’t hear any echoes of the discomfort that began to set in following the end of the Sixties. Instead, life seemed pretty good. As happy as Tupelo Honey is, Van apparently didn’t enjoy making the album, as he had just moved to Marin County, leaving Old Old Woodstock to the hippies who didn’t have a map to Max Yasgur’s farm. He doth protest too much, because he certainly sounds in the mood for love here.

Van Morrison Tupelo Honey (1971)—3
2008 CD reissue: same as 1971, plus 2 extra tracks

R.E.M. 11: Monster

2011-10-31T07:05:00.003-04:00

Their audience was growing up, and that sometimes means things get left behind. Looking back we really do think that R.E.M.’s rot set in when Michael Stipe started shaving his head—sometime between the last video filmed for Automatic For The People and the first video filmed for its highly anticipated and ultimately disappointing follow-up.
Full disclosure: the first thing we heard from this album was catching the last few seconds of “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” on MTV, back when they used to play music videos in between Rocking the Vote and Real World marathons. The thing is, we didn’t know it was R.E.M; we saw the bald guy and just assumed it was Midnight Oil.
It was, and still is a pretty good tune, complete with garbled lyrics and a backwards guitar solo. It certainly rocks, setting the tone for the rest of the album. Monster is a striking contrast to its mostly acoustic predecessor, and it’s been suggested that the deaths of friends Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix fueled the anger that inspired them to turn up the volume. Whatever the truth is, the album is an assault, and it hurts.
The same tremolo guitar continues throughout the album, starting with “Crush With Eyeliner” and its unfortunate cameo by Thurston Moore, itself a gesture that if you don’t get it, you’re just not cool. “King Of Comedy” sputters along with a monotonic vocal and flat drumming. “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” sounds like a work in progress, with typical arpeggios and a lack of melody. “Star 69” is a step in the right direction, a straight-ahead punk rocker with a title that too many people get, lessening any mystery. Critics pointed to “Strange Currencies” as a relative of “Everybody Hurts”, which is lazy. It appears to be something of a love song.
The same can be said for “Tongue”, sung in an unfortunate falsetto over piano and organ. It wanders along before finally petering out. “Bang And Blame” is the bastard child of “Losing My Religion” and “Orange Crush”, which is probably why it’s catchy. (Actually, we wouldn’t mind hearing more of the snippet that appears before the next song, “I Took Your Name”, which sounds too much like everything else on the album.) “Let Me In” is supposed to be the Cobain tribute, but why aren’t there any drums? “Circus Envy” would benefit from a mix that reduces the snottiness quotient on the guitars. “You” is a decent closer (they were always good at those) but again, the pulsating fuzz is a distraction.
We’re not alone in our disdain of Monster; you can find several duplicate copies of it in any used CD rack. We have tried to like this album and have failed miserably. It’s possible that these songs would stand out better if they weren’t all on the same album; taken all together they make a noisy mess. There are people who still stand behind this album, but we can’t.

R.E.M. Monster (1994)—2

William Shatner: The Transformed Man and Has Been

2011-10-28T07:03:00.002-04:00

There are several theories as to how it happened, but whatever the real story, William Shatner did indeed record an album at the height of Star Trek’s original prime-time run. Unlike other TV stars, he didn’t attempt to sing on the album, instead using his theater-trained voice to recite words over a not-so-hip backing. (By contrast, Leonard Nimoy put out five albums in the late ‘60s, and sang on each one of them.)
Shatner intended The Transformed Man to explain a journey of sorts, illustrated by juxtapositions of poetry and Shakespeare soliloquys with modern pop lyrics. The theater pieces are pompous enough, but he sounds a little drunk on “It Was A Very Good Year” and “How Insensitive”, and downright crazed on “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” (still the greatest-ever version of that song, if only for the final three seconds).
The album wasn’t a hit in the slightest, but gained notoriety over the years as an example of what ego and possible proximity to hallucinogenics can achieve. Once Rhino Records included a couple of tracks on their first Golden Throats album of actors singing badly, it was plucked from obscurity, much to its creator’s chagrin.
So is it really a bad album? That’s a matter of opinion. We feel that it belongs in the “so bad it’s good” category, and used to enjoy playing it on late nights at the CD store to see what customers would stay and who would leave. (The same experiment was performed using Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Frank Zappa.)

Once Bill decided to embrace his camp status, he started making the rounds of snarky comedy shows working his monologue magic, and used his status as the Priceline spokesman to do a series of ads in a faux-coffeehouse setting with Ben Folds in the band behind him. When he was approached by a Rhino offshoot to do another album, Shatner turned the tables by not only agreeing, but embracing the chance to make a sequel of sorts.
Has Been once again features the man on the microphone, but speaking mostly his own words. Ben Folds produced the album, wrote the music, and fostered the other selections—like the opening track, a hilarious cover of Pulp’s “Common People” that turns into a duet with Joe Jackson halfway through. Brad Paisley stopped writing songs about fishing long enough to contribute “Real”, a profound meditation on public image. And novelist Nick Hornby provided the lyric for the melancholy “That’s Me Trying”, one side of a conversation with an estranged daughter with choruses filled out by Folds and Aimee Mann.
In fact, most of Shatner’s lyrics reflect his thoughts about aging and his own fame, particularly on “It Hasn’t Happened Yet”, “You’ll Have Time” and the goofy title track. A trio of songs about romance follow the harrowing “What Have You Done?”, wherein he recounts discovering his wife’s drowned corpse in their swimming pool. “I Can’t Get Behind That”, a rant shouted with Henry Rollins, provides excellent comic relief.
Half of Has Been is great, and the rest not so, but where else can you hear Joe Jackson, Aimee Mann, Henry Rollins and Bill Shatner in the same place? Best of all, it gives the man a chance to rise above the caricatures and actually move the listener.

William Shatner The Transformed Man (1968)—3
William Shatner Has Been (2004)—3

Byrds 5: The Notorious Byrd Brothers

2011-10-26T08:54:00.002-04:00

The band’s fifth album in three years shows the Byrds to be something of a parallel to the Rolling Stones at the time. (Wait just a second and we’ll explain.) Just as Younger Than Yesterday and Between The Buttons came out in that netherland of 1967 before Sgt. Pepper, The Notorious Byrd Brothers documents the down side of the Summer of Love, as did Their Satanic Majesties Request. (See? That wasn’t such a stretch, was it?)
One truly notorious aspect of this album even has its own page on Snopes, the urban legend debunking website. David Crosby was fired from the band before the album was finished, and while he does appear on it, the cover only shows Hillman, McGuinn, Clarke and a horse. Crosby insists the horse was there deliberately to represent him, but we have to agree with McGuinn, who said that if it was really intentional, the other end of the horse would have been depicted.
But even more notorious is that while many pundits have gone out of their way to praise this album as a masterpiece, we’re not going to do that. The album is forced and disjointed, and too many of the songs sound too much alike for them to stand out, with a few exceptions that only underscore the shakiness of the set.
“Artificial Energy” sports acidic horns and a sped-up vocal for a song explicitly about drugs, but the real Byrds-like emerges in “Goin’ Back”, a wistful wish for the simplicity of childhood from the pens of Goffin and King. Chris Hillman’s “Natural Harmony” ends up sounding more like the Crosby songs on the album, which we’ll get to soon. “Draft Morning” is a better contrast to “Goin’ Back”, in its explicit glimpse of a soldier in the trenches; the sound effects are a matter of personal taste. The defiant stance continues in “Wasn’t Born To Follow”, another Goffin/King song and one that would become something of a hippie anthem. After the sound of a slamming door, McGuinn comes in to sing a baroque ode to London in “Get To You”.
Many of the songs on the first side are cross-faded, and that continues on the second. “Change Is Now” is a basic drone around the 12-string, with a double-time detour through a pedal-steel. “Old John Robertson” is included in a different mix than on the single, and it only underscores the exclusion of “Lady Friend”, for no other reason than to spite Crosby. Instead, he’s represented by “Tribal Gathering”, a pale rewrite of “Renaissance Fair”, and “Dolphin’s Smile”, the brevity of which doesn’t hint at the struggles they had recording it. (Seven minutes of an argument among the band members while they were trying to figure out how to play the damn thing are hidden at the end of the expanded CD. They all end up sounding like a-holes, and Mike Clarke’s ambivalence explains why Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon are credited with drums on the album.) And of course, McGuinn had to include another sci-fi song in the form of “Space Odyssey”, which beat out the Kubrick film by about three months, and sported the prominent use of a Moog synthesizer.
Considering how much struggle went into recording the album, it’s a shame there aren’t more interesting outtakes on the expanded CD. Beyond a Moog instrumental and a take of a song Chris Hillman would use in a later collaboration, plus a couple of alternate takes, the biggest revelation is Crosby’s classic “Triad”, which would never make it to one of his own albums until a live recording with his next band. But that’s another story. We still can’t point to The Notorious Byrd Brothers as the Byrds’ best, especially considering what was coming next. It remains a shaky collection of stubborn songs.

The Byrds The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)—2½
1997 CD reissue: same as 1968, plus 6 extra tracks

Tom Waits 11: Franks Wild Years

2011-10-24T08:15:00.001-04:00

Soon after releasing Rain Dogs, Tom threw himself into a new form of expression. In between a couple of arty film roles, he worked on expanding one transitional track from Swordfishtrombones into a full-fledged musical play—with actors and everything—telling the story of the rise and fall of a shifty guy named Frank. By the time it became an album, Franks Wild Years had evolved from the story as seen briefly on a Chicago stage to a hard-to-follow album that relied more on sound than narrative.
A key part of his arsenal now included a miniature bullhorn, which combined with his falsetto to make the lyrics even raspier. “Hang On St. Christopher” opens the album in another automobile, giving way to the first of two versions of “Straight To The Top”. “Blow Wind Blow” has a clean production for a change, but the Captain Beefheart influence turns “Temptation” into a nightmare. The first thing approaching a classic is “Innocent When You Dream”, first heard in a “barroom” arrangement to accent its singlaong quality. “I’ll Be Gone” relies too much on a rooster for its percussion. “Yesterday Is Here” is nice and simple, mostly around his own reverbed guitar, but then he wanders around the flute setting on a Mellotron for about a minute to bury the melody of “Please Wake Me Up”, eventually giving way to a much dreamier organ solo. “Franks Theme” (for some reason he doesn’t rate an apostrophe) ends the first act with a prayer for a decent night’s sleep.
“More Than Rain” has been more effectively covered by others; here it sounds like he’s singing along to an acetate. “Way Down In The Hole” is a preacher’s rant over a single bass line and the same two saxophone notes, but with wonderfully typical Marc Ribot guitar solos. He does a wonderful attempt at Sinatra phrasing, and nearly the tone, on the “Vegas” version of “Straight To The Top”, which builds up to a grand crescendo before the nightmare returns on the organ and the Ethel Mermanisms of “I’ll Take New York”. It’s never been clear what “Telephone Call From Istanbul” has to do with anything, but it wins points for the following couplets: “Will you sell me one of those if I shave my head/Get me out of town is what Fireball said/Never trust a man in a blue trench coat/Never drive a car when you're dead”. We also like the too-short organ solo. “Cold Cold Ground” seems like a title he would have used already, but here it’s a nice little country song. He finally returns to the piano for the hapless “Train Song”, and “Innocent When You Dream” returns on a 78 to remind us of all that’s been lost.
It could be that the parts of Franks Wild Years are greater than the whole, but coming after the excellence of his last two album, it was something of a letdown. We were told there was a story in between the songs, but how Frank went from burning his house down to bragging of fame and fortune before dying on a park bench doesn’t come through. (Plus, he’d already summed up the whole arc better and briefer in “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis”.)

Tom Waits Franks Wild Years (1987)—2

Lou Reed 7: New York

2011-10-21T07:38:00.002-04:00

Despite the mild increase of interest in the Velvet Underground, Lou spent much of the ‘80s mostly underwhelming listeners with so-so albums. 1984’s joyously stupid single “I Love You Suzanne” and even a track on the fairly commercial White Nights soundtrack notwithstanding, most people in those days would have best associated him with a TV ad for Honda scooters.
Therefore, it was easy to be skeptical of New York—until you heard it. It was an especially big deal on a radio station like the late great WNEW-FM, who played it cut by cut with the man in the studio one night, even taking calls from listeners. (The lucky few who tuned in for the whole broadcast may recall hearing the last caller they took on the air, nervously gushing about Lou’s work, stumbling through a question about Lester Bangs and thanking him for writing “Sad Song”. “Oh, thanks, that’s one I like too,” said Lou.)
Following the lead of previous returns to form, the music consisted of his guitar in one speaker, another in the other, plus bass and drums. The lyrics read like the Op-Ed page of The New York Times and are still as clever as they were timely. It’s allegedly sequenced in the order the songs were recorded, and designed to be listened to in one sitting. It helps, of course, that the songs are so good that they don’t merely combine for an onslaught of negativity. Much of it sports the grime and grit of the city’s streets, but there’s some tenderness in there too.
With a couple of chords captured mid-strum, “Romeo Had Juliette” mixes a street romance with criminal commentary, then it’s off to the “Halloween Parade”, which explicitly points out the effects of AIDS on the city. “Dirty Blvd.” was the single, and includes the album’s first reference to “the Statue of Bigotry”; the poetry is continued on the metronomic “Endless Cycle”. He finally turns it up for “There Is No Time”, a call for revolution. (Another highlight of his radio visit was his suggestion that reviving public hangings in Central Park would be an excellent crime deterrent.) Environmental concerns dominate the quieter “Last Great American Whale”, complete with Moe Tucker on percussion. And the frightening concept of Lou as a dad is broached for “Beginning Of A Great Adventure”.
Generally a list is a lazy lyric, but “Busload Of Faith” works as both a song and a message. “Sick Of You” is a twisted look at the news that’s not as outlandish as it could be, particularly in comparison to the tensions chronicled in “Hold On”. “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim” covers the hypocrisy of racism, not only from the gentleman in the title but from the Pope and Jesse Jackson. The plight of the homeless Vietnam vet is raised for “Xmas In February”, and he summons all his anger for “Strawman”. “Dime Store Mystery” provides a striking finale, comparing the last thoughts of Andy Warhol to those of Jesus Christ as depicted in a recent Scorcese film.
Any summary of the album will fall short of the sensory experience, of course. A lot of rock legends put out albums in 1989 that re-established them commercially and critically, but not only was New York one of the first albums released that year, it was also one of the best. He kept it simple and he kept it real. Amazingly—and sadly—the lyrical content doesn’t seem dated at all. His new label was pretty pleased with it too.

Lou Reed New York (1989)—5

Byrds 4: Younger Than Yesterday

2011-10-19T09:28:00.002-04:00

The biggest surprise for the Byrds’ fourth album was a welcome one. While each of the singers stepped up the quality of their songwriting, it was Chris Hillman who managed to provide the balance so needed in the band, and made Younger Than Yesterday an improvement on its predecessor.
They were still a quartet, but had begun to play with their image. McGuinn lost the granny glasses, and started experimenting with facial hair. Crosby grew the mustache he wouldn’t shave for twenty years—and only then at the behest of federal prison wardens—and began wearing hats to hide his receding hairline. And Chris stopped ironing his own hair, letting it blossom into its natural ‘fro. (These things were important at the time.)
The lead track on the album, “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star”, is a wonderful blend of the potential of the Rickenbacker 12-string with harmonies pushing a lyric that could either be taken as a swipe at the Monkees or their own image. “Have You Seen Her Face” is the first Hillman offering, a great power-pop nugget with chunky guitar. But it was still the ‘60s and McGuinn’s fascination with sci-fi led to “C.T.A.-102”, another plea for alien intervention torpedoed by a lengthy funny-voice section. Crosby’s “Renaissance Fair” is short but sweet, a nice premonition of the Summer of Love. Chris comes back with “Time Between”, another country-flavored number with future Byrd Clarence White bending his B-string all over the place. And Crosby responds with “Everybody’s Been Burned”, his best yet contribution to the band, layered in droning finger-picking and pensive lyrics.
Lest you think he was just a bumpkin, “Thoughts And Words” gives Chris a little touch of psychedelia in the way of a backwards 12-string. If you like that sound, you’ll love “Mind Gardens”, a phenomenally self-indulgent Crosby exercise in avoiding melody to sound deep. Luckily “My Back Pages” comes next, wherein the Byrds once again take a Dylan song, turn it inside out, and make it a classic. “The Girl With No Name” is a nice distillation of the other Hillman songs on the album, and this time the last word is given to a re-recording of “Why”, an alternate of the B-side from the year before.
While the progression to psychedelia wouldn’t be smooth, Younger Than Yesterday shows that the Byrds had a knack for finding a hit song in between all their experiments. Only hindsight would illuminate that their chances of keeping it together in that volatile environment were slim. The tension is only slightly hinted at in the bonuses on the upgraded CD, in the Crosby outtake “It Happens Each Day” and the pointless B-side movie theme “Don’t Make Waves”. A couple of alternates would interest collectors, but in the interest of context, we also get the criminally unappreciated “Lady Friend” and its lesser B-side “Old John Robertson”. And if you’re paying attention, you may be intrigued to hear that the closing instrumental is unlisted, but is revealed to be the backwards guitar track from “Mind Gardens” run forward.

The Byrds Younger Than Yesterday (1967)—4
1996 CD reissue: same as 1967, plus 6 extra tracks

Badfinger 1: Magic Christian Music

2011-10-17T07:50:00.002-04:00

Every now and then we wish VH-1 would repeat some of their original Behind The Music episodes. Surely if they can show that hideous four-hour Jackson family dramatization (starring Freddie “Boom-Boom” Washington as Papa Joe) twice a month, can’t we at least relive the Leif Garrett story at 3am?
One of the better installments was the one they did for Badfinger. This was far and away one of the best and truly saddest stories they tackled. While every other profile at least suggested that there was hope after the big crash, the Badfinger story started about elbow high, then sank steadily. There was no big career arc here, outside of getting discovered by the Beatles, which probably did as much work against them as for them. They sported a truly great songwriter in Pete Ham, a guy who loved nothing more than writing songs and making records. And when the music business took that away from him, he hung himself.
It really is a shame, since they started with such promise. They also started with a different lineup and sound. Signed to Apple under the name The Iveys, they recorded a pleasant pop album with more than a little Beatle influence, and several nods to British music hall. Due to record company shenanigans, Maybe Tomorrow was released only in Germany and Italy, but not in the UK or the US.
Within a year bass player Ron Griffiths left the band, and the others were given the assignment of replicating a Paul McCartney demo for the soundtrack of a movie Ringo was in. Despite its lyrical brevity, “Come And Get It” was a catchy hit, and the band (now called Badfinger) were allowed to contribute a couple more songs to the film. The resulting Magic Christian Music album included those songs, plus seven tracks from Maybe Tomorrow, some of which were remixed for the better.
Pete hasn’t quite emerged as a songwriter yet, though “Carry On Till Tomorrow” and “Rock Of All Ages” (with McCartney bashing away on piano and adding occasional whoops) show the two sides of Tom Evans. From Ron’s extra sweet “Dear Angie” through Tom’s lilting “Fisherman” and “Maybe Tomorrow”, it’s the sound of a group finding its own pop sound in a time when that was becoming passé for a rock band. “Crimson Ship” sports a great chorus and guitar to match, even if it doesn’t make much sense.
Despite the respect and royalties the band and estates finally received over the years, their digital legacy is just as confusing as their vinyl catalog. Both Maybe Tomorrow and Magic Christian Music were included in the first CD versions of the Apple catalog, but only the latter album was featured in the 2010 rollout. As a further complication, the new CD offered different bonus tracks than the first time, with a further selection available only as either digital downloads or in a massive box set covering all the main Apple artists.

Iveys Maybe Tomorrow (1969)—3
1992 CD reissue: same as 1969, plus 4 extra tracks
Badfinger Magic Christian Music (1970)—3
1992 CD reissue: same as 1970, plus 4 extra tracks
2010 CD reissue: same as 1970, plus 7 extra tracks

Peter Gabriel 12: Scratch My Back

2011-10-14T08:12:00.002-04:00

The good news was that fans didn’t have to wait another decade for a new Peter Gabriel album. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the long-promised I/O, said to have been derived from the pre-Up period. Instead, he recorded an album of covers, with orchestral backing.
The earliest hint of what would be Scratch My Back came with his version of “The Book Of Love”, recorded for a movie nobody saw, but soon became ubiquitous on TV soundtracks. From there he chose songs from established and newer artists, and gave each an impassioned vocal reading over stark arrangements.
By choosing from such a big pool, he risks blasphemy by screwing with songs people already know and love, but may also introduced the uninitiated to music they might have otherwise never heard. The “standards” arguably come first; “Heroes” takes the drums out of the Bowie song, leaving the strings to drive everything, while “Boy In The Bubble” is far removed from Paul Simon’s African groove. He’s about the 80th person to tackle “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today”, but interestingly redoes Neil Young’s “Philadelphia”, from movie soundtrack to which he’d also contributed. However, his interest in deep catalog unearths lesser-known tracks by Talking Heads and Lou Reed. (Apparently, Radiohead were not pleased with his overhaul of their song.) He can thank his kids for exposing him to bands like Elbow, The Magnetic Fields, Arcade Fire and Bon Iver.
Scratch My Back was supposed to inspire a songwriters’ exchange called I’ll Scratch Yours (get it?), wherein each of the artist Peter covered would in turn record a version of one of his songs. As would be expected by now, this never came to completion; only six of the new recordings appeared, and as iTunes exclusives. His delivery throughout certainly displays his enthusiasm and devotion to this music, but ultimately one wishes he could get the same inspiration from his own personal muse, and come up with something as simple and pure.

Peter Gabriel Scratch My Back (2010)—3

Byrds 3: Fifth Dimension

2011-10-12T06:35:00.002-04:00

On only their third album, the Byrds were down to a quartet. Gene Clark, whose superior songwriting was resented by the others, left the band under the excuse that he was afraid to fly and couldn’t tour. As a result, Fifth Dimension suffers from his absence. The hits are there, of course, and the band’s blend of stellar harmonies and improved playing holds them together, but something’s missing, and it’s Gene.
“5D (Fifth Dimension)” shows Jim McGuinn already getting out there in terms of science fiction, and approaching psychedelia. Its dense lyrics are nicely matched to a folk melody, which is echoed in their pretty arrangement of “Wild Mountain Thyme”. Then it’s back to sci-fi with the jaunty “Mr. Spaceman”, which is much easier to sing despite the forcibly Dylanesque imagery. “I See You” demonstrates some of McGuinn and Crosby’s interest in Coltrane free jazz, which would improve elsewhere. “What’s Happening?!?!” is a much better Crosby song, and very indicative of the questioning types of lyrics he’d continue to write. Side one concludes with the striking “I Come And Stand At Every Door”, sung from the point of view of a young Hiroshima victim.
Side two starts strong, but runs immediately out of steam. “Eight Miles High” more than delivers on what they picked up from Coltrane, and it’s still quite a striking song today. Contrast this with Crosby’s version of “Hey Joe”; while they were the last of the LA bands to record it, they were among the first to play it, and unfortunately for them, others did it much better. Then there’s “Captain Soul”, a plodding instrumental jam featuring the return of Gene Clark on harmonica. “John Riley” is another Byrds take on a folk song, but this album’s version of the gag finale is given over to “2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)”. While it attempts to be “groundbreaking” in its use of sound effects, here the sound of an airplane taking off comes off more like a vacuum cleaner, and the music isn’t much more inspired than “Captain Soul”.
The whole of Fifth Dimension does equal more than the parts, but it’s clear that the pressure to create product without relying on Dylan or Gene Clark songs was a bit much. The bonuses on the updated CD include the B-side “Why”, plus alternates of that and “Eight Miles High” that are pretty intense. “Psychodrama City” is an okay Crosby song that uses too much improvised 12-string, and it’s just as well they didn’t finish “I Know You Rider” for a single. The token instrumental to close out the CD is a chaotic “jazz” take on “John Riley”, and the bulk of the remainder is a hidden vintage open-ended interview with McGuinn and Crosby discussing the hip influences on the album.

The Byrds Fifth Dimension (1966)—3
1996 CD reissue: same as 1966, plus 6 extra tracks

Robert Plant 9: Band Of Joy

2011-10-10T07:18:00.004-04:00

Never one to go for a surefire cash cow, Robert didn’t push a second collaboration with Alison Krauss, but kept his interest in Americana fresh with an album named after one of his pre-Zeppelin bands. Band Of Joy even keeps his old Es Paranza afloat; has anyone else had that label? Such luminaries as Patty Griffin and Buddy Miller round out the band for a sound closer to Dreamland than Raising Sand.
For the most part, he’s content to reinterpret other people’s material here, starting with Los Lobos’ “Angel Dance” and an older Richard Thompson song. There are two, count ‘em, two songs by Minnesota slowcore pioneers Low.
“You Can’t Buy My Love” has a nice Merseybeat guitar part, which makes sense since the song dates from about 1964. “Falling In Love Again” manages to straddle country, gospel and doo-wop. If somebody’s watching out for Townes Van Zandt’s estate, they’ll likely be pleased by the rendition of “Harm’s Swift Way” here. The balance of the tracks are new arrangements of traditional songs, and with such titles as “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” and “Cindy I’ll Marry You Someday”.
Once again Robert made a decent album, and even got critical kudos for it. Band Of Joy isn’t remotely annoying, but it doesn’t exactly leap out of the speakers. It can be enjoyed, and filed.

Robert Plant Band Of Joy (2010)—3

R.E.M. 10: Automatic For The People

2011-10-07T07:00:00.002-04:00

Automatic For The People arrived on one of those crisp October days, without a hint of Indian summer in the air. It was still exciting to hear a new album by a band you liked, especially one as unpredictable as R.E.M. (We were also pretty happy it came relatively quickly after their last one.)
“Drive” had already made it to the radio, with its menacing acoustic-with-strings echo of the previous album. And we still couldn’t understand a damn word he was saying. “Try Not To Breathe” sets the mortality theme, lifted a hair by the goofiness in “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”. “Everybody Hurts” wore out its welcome pretty quick, though the video and its nod to Falling Down (itself a nod to The Swimmer) is still a great visual artifact. “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1” is suitably daring yet slight, but “Sweetness Follows” ends the side on a pretty and elegant note.
“Monty Got A Raw Deal” starts side two in a somewhat reminiscent echo of “Drive” on side one; it’s supposed to be about Montgomery Clift, whom the Clash had already covered in “The Right Profile”. “Ignoreland” crashes through with its Neil Young tuning and angry diatribe against the Bush regime (which would be gone within a month, thanks in part to Stipe and his friends on MTV). This song has unfortunately not been any less relevant over the years. “Star Me Kitten” is built around the same vocals-as-machine effect as “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc. “Man In The Moon” follows, a tribute to a “comedian” not everyone thinks was funny since he’d first done the Mighty Mouse gag about 17 years earlier, but it’s still pretty catchy. “Nightswimming” still haunts, even for those who haven’t gone skinnydipping at any hour. It evokes a memory of summers long gone, and the carefree nights of youth. “Find The River” brings it all to a close with lyrics alternately hopeful and hopeless. (“I have got to find the river!” we’d declare, emphatically.)
As autumn descended and the year drew to a close, Automatic For The People became a pleasant comfort. Little did we know it would be their last great album. It’s also the one we’ve listened to most when preparing for whatever the next album would be. While not above their first four, it’s still a remarkable collection of music. (Kurt Cobain said he’d wanted to record an album with the same acoustic approach. Instead, he shot himself. We still wonder what that album would have sounded like had he completed it.) Again, this was their last great album, and we might as well consider it their last album. It would have been a good way to go out.

R.E.M. Automatic For The People (1992)—4½

Van Morrison 3: His Band And The Street Choir

2011-10-05T12:11:00.002-04:00

Van’s further flirtation with mainstream appeal continued with His Band And The Street Choir, an acoustic R&B album that’s even happier than Moondance. There’s only one song in a minor key, and even that’s a romantic one.
The best songs still endure—“Domino” is a wonderful opener, with interesting interplay between the guitar and the horn section. We still have no idea what “Crazy Face” is about, even if it’s just a setup for his squawking two-note sax solo. “Give Me A Kiss” is about as light as things get, though he summons his inner James Brown for “I’ve Been Working”. “Call Me Up In Dreamland” is another ode to the magic of radio, and the equally devotional “I’ll Be Your Lover, Too” recalls the quieter sound of Astral Weeks. (At the end he asks, “How was that?” We don’t hear the answer.)
“Blue Money” was a mild hit, but the nonsense chorus and falsetto chirping of somebody in the choir gets a little grating. The simple strum of “Virgo Clowns” epitomizes the nicely relaxed feel of the album, even if the laughter filling the room at the end is a little gratuitous. A celeste introduces “Gypsy Queen”, something of a falsetto lullabye. “Sweet Jannie” is fairly basic, but “If I Ever Needed Someone” is a wonderful gospel original. The closing “Street Choir” is a little confusing; as a virtual title track (supposedly against Van’s wishes) it doesn’t really sum up the album, and we wonder who’s left America.
His Band And The Street Choir is wonderfully lighthearted throughout, and another satisfier overall. It’s not too deep, and it’s just plain catchy. The cover art depicts the artist as hippie troubadour, surrounded by happy families of musicians undoubtedly enjoying life without a care in the world. And again, there are some lovely pleading liner notes from the wife. It fits nicely with other homespun albums of the period, from such contemporaries as The Band and James Taylor, and even stretching to Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan. It was almost as if the Sixties were still in bloom.

Van Morrison His Band And The Street Choir (1970)—3½

Peter Gabriel 11: Up

2011-10-03T09:28:00.002-04:00

After several years of rumors and false confirmations from the man himself, a full ten years passed between Peter Gabriel’s albums, a break that spanned the Millennium. In the meantime he’d become very active on the Internet with his own personal website. In person he’d come to resemble none other than Burl Ives, a far leap from the skinny, hirsute frontman of old.
Up starts promisingly enough with the fiendish “Darkness”—thirty seconds of muted percussion before exploding with a cry of pain or something, moving through sections reminiscent of the eerier tracks on the third and fourth albums. “Growing Up” delivers an upbeat groove but not much in the way of melody. The haunting “Sky Blue” is based largely around a piece also used on a film soundtrack, specifically a repeated refrain sung by the Blind Boys Of Alabama. “No Way Out” has a rhythm reminiscent of “In Your Eyes”, but is nowhere near as catchy. Those fans who’d held onto their copies of the City Of Angels soundtrack might have appreciated the alternate version of “I Grieve” included here.
The downfall of taking so long on this album meant that “The Barry Williams Show” becomes a weak diatribe against the likes of Jerry Springer, and makes it just as dated as it would have become anyway. (Apparently he wasn’t familiar with the iconic American status of the Brady Bunch actor, and used Shooter McGavin in the video instead.) “My Head Sounds Like That” sports a gripping but sad backing of piano and brass band, turning things up in the middle. While it’s not the Roxy Music song of the same name, “More Than This” is another attempt at a hit single. More uneasy listening comes in “Signal To Noise”, which thankfully abates for “The Drop”, which is just Peter and the piano.
While Up has its moments, it’s just not that memorable, which is one of the last things we’d ever thought we’d say about a Peter Gabriel album. Perhaps all that time tweaking things in his quest for the perfect sound. It also didn’t help that he’s easily distracted, as evidenced by such things as the OVO project. But he never wanted to be a superstar, and always strove to make his own music. That’s why he’s still got a rabid fan base, who would have been happy to snap up the “official bootlegs” from the tours that followed Up, with each show represented on CDs pressed from the soundbaord mixes.

Peter Gabriel Up (2002)—2½

Byrds 2: Turn! Turn! Turn!

2011-09-30T07:49:00.001-04:00

Back when bands used to put out two albums a year—the luxury! Can you imagine?—it wasn’t common for said bands to screw with the formula too much. That’s how the Byrds’ second album gave the kids what they wanted: 12-string guitars, pristine harmonies and a couple of Dylan covers.
But they were smart guys, so Turn! Turn! Turn! wasn’t a complete retread of their debut. It helped that the title track was a huge hit, borrowed from a Pete Seeger arrangement of some Bible verses. “It Won’t Be Wrong” was left over from their earliest days trying to get a record deal, but “Set You Free This Time” stands out with Gene Clark’s rugged yet right lament on lost love. Listen for his mournful harmonica on the fade. It’s to the band’s credit that they managed to cover a previously unheard Bob Dylan song, the majestic ode to music of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”. The boys do a nice job finding harmonies for it, and somebody thought it was a good idea to bring Chris Hillman’s bass all the way up in the mix. Another stretch comes with the updated adaptation of the old folk song “He Was A Friend Of Mine”, which directly references the Kennedy assassination.
Another Gene Clark classic starts off side two in “The World Turns All Around Her”, framed by all those interlocking 12-strings. There’s a detour into a cover of another folk chestnut, “Satisfied Mind”, before we go back way left field for “If You’re Gone”. This song is, yes, another masterpiece by Gene Clark, a sad goodbye over unresolved harmonies that add an other-worldly air to the Eastern-sounding guitar. Unfortunately the effect is killed by a rather tepid run through “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, and “Wait And See”, the first David Crosby song credit on a Byrds album, is just okay. In keeping with tradition, they end with a gag: this time it’s a folk-rock rendition of “Oh! Susannah”.
Turn! Turn! Turn! is still a good album, and shows off their progress as a tight band, but it stills amounts to some water-treading. What was missing is apparent on the upgraded CD. First, there’s “The Day Walk”, occasionally subtitled “Never Before”, an incredible song surpassed in its untimely sophistication by the wondrous “She Don’t Care About Time”, which had been relegated to a B-side. It should come as no surprise by now that both of these songs were written by Gene Clark, whose quality of work was obviously starting to intimidate the more headstrong full-time guitar players in the band. It’s a matter of taster whether McGuinn’s Bach-flavored solo on the latter song was a good idea or just him trying to steal some limelight. A different arrangement of “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, an unreleased take of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, a couple of alternate takes and a song that never got vocals, “Stranger In A Strange Land”, round out the bonuses, bringing up the disc’s value greatly.

The Byrds Turn! Turn! Turn! (1965)—3
1996 CD reissue: same as 1965, plus 7 extra tracks

Velvet Underground 6: VU and Another View

2011-09-28T09:52:00.002-04:00

In an early clue to the reissue trend of the CD era, Bill Levenson at PolyGram started taking advantage of the latest remastering technology to explore some of the lost treasures in the company’s vaults. Having acquired the rights to the Verve and MGM labels, he was able to coordinate the reissues of the first three Velvet Underground albums, which had long been out of print. (Loaded was still owned by Atlantic, and had stayed in their catalog on the strength of “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll”.)
Glowing press items and the budget price helped push each album, but just as interesting to newcomers and old fans alike was the cool collection of unreleased tracks Levenson found in the same vaults and spruced up nicely, even adding a more contemporary snap to the drums.
While most of the tracks were recorded in the space between the third album and Loaded, the notes took pains to insist that VU was in no way a rumored lost album; it was still a testament to Lou Reed’s ability to write great songs and the band’s ability to deliver them. “I Can’t Stand It”, “Ocean” and “Lisa Says” were of course familiar to the seven people who’d bought Lou’s first solo album. These versions rock as good as any; “Lisa Says” in particular benefits from not having the “why am I so shy” interlude. Likewise, “She’s My Best Friend” and “Andy’s Chest” are run at faster paces than Lou’s sluggish solo takes. Just as revelatory is “Stephanie Says”, which would be redone on Berlin and here features a wonderful arpeggiated guitar part plus John Cale’s fittingly sympathetic viola.
Then there are the completely new tracks. “Foggy Notion” chugs along like a train (particularly on the LP version, which has a false start available nowhere else), but the more ordinary “One Of These Days” was best left aside. “Temptation Inside Your Heart” sounds like they didn’t want to bother mixing the vocal parts, but it’s still nice to hear the boys banter in the booth. And good old Moe Tucker gets the last word with the exceptionally sweet “I’m Sticking With You”.

VU must have been something of a success, as nothing else could explain how a second volume, with the phonetically clever title Another View, snuck into stores with no fanfare and the same inner sleeve that had graced its brother reissues. This one was definitely for obsessives, as the multiple takes and backing tracks are more indicative of a bootleg. While the sound is excellent and up to major-label standards, one longs to hear the lyrics that would have graced such songs as “Guess I’m Falling In Love” and “Ride Into The Sun”; at the same time, “I’m Gonna Move Right In” isn’t much more than a jam. “We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together” was familiar to longtime fans, though “Ferryboat Bill” and “Coney Island Steeplechase” could have spent more time being honed before recording. The first recorded version of “Rock & Roll” is nice from a historical standpoint, but you’d be hard-pressed to decide which version of “Hey Mr. Rain” is better. Both feature John Cale, and both are stunning. If you like that sort of thing.

The Velvet Underground VU (1985)—3½
The Velvet Underground Another View (1986)—3

Robert Plant 8: Raising Sand

2011-09-26T07:32:00.002-04:00

To the astonishment of everyone, Robert Plant managed his biggest critical success in years—if not ever—for his collaboration with Alison Krauss on Raising Sand. Much of the success can be attributed to hip roots music producer T Bone Burnett, who’d already sold millions and got a Grammy for his work on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. The sound sits somewhere between that, a Daniel Lanois production and a Tom Waits album, and not just from using some of the same musicians.
Alison Krauss has one of the sweetest, clearest voices in music, not to mention that she’s a cute as a box full of buttons. She’s also a great fiddle player, which takes a back seat to the songs. The selections run the gamut from bluegrass standards to newer folk nuggets. The exceptions are a recent Waits tune, which Alison nails, and amazingly, “Please Read The Letter”, a song first heard on the Page/Plant album and here taken at a much more contemplative pace. The two Gene Clark songs are exceptional, though we can do without yet another version of “Fortune Teller”. The track that got the most exposure was the chugging “Gone Gone Gone (Done Me Wrong)”, which sounded the most like something like Robert might have sung earlier in his solo career.
Most of the songs are duets, and they blend nicely. What’s especially impressive is the development of Robert’s voice as he’s aged. For a tangential comparison, consider the recent sounds of Bob Dylan, who finally stopped yelling like he did through most of the ‘80s and got more comfortable in the lower register. That kept his voice from getting worse until just recently. Robert’s done that too; he doesn’t go for the high notes at all, and instead has made the most of the notes he can reach.
Raising Sand is the culmination of his work since the turn of the century, immersing himself in older folk and country songs and reinterpreting them in fresh ways. Not only did it win a Grammy, but it kept him interested in doing absolutely anything besides heeding the inevitable calls for a Zeppelin reunion. It’s a special album; not about to replace the band that spawned him, but it’s far from an embarrassment.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Raising Sand (2007)—4

R.E.M. 9: Out Of Time

2011-09-23T06:54:00.002-04:00

After their longest absence yet, Out Of Time sent R.E.M. thoroughly in to the stratosphere. It still had its weird moments, but concentrated more on straight pop with lighter touches—like chamber string arrangements—to truly appeal to the masses.
That’s not to suggest it would be confused with anything else on the pop charts. The very first sound we hear is KRS-One’s spoken intro to “Radio Song”, which blasts the current state of the broadcast medium. The song alternates between a standard arpeggiated section and a funky organ-based rant, with more KRS-One. The striking first single was “Losing My Religion”, and it’s easier to maintain one’s interest by continually embellishing it with different lyrics (“It’s bigger than you and you’re not that big…that’s me in the bathroom, that’s me in the driveway…consider this, consider this a divorce…every waking hour I’m flossing my bicuspids, brushing my incisors…I thought I heard you sing, I tawt I taw a puddy tat…”) “Low” provides the old swampy R.E.M. sound, though we still scratch our heads to the repeated lines about “love”. Contemporary interviews said this was their first album that dealt with the topic of romantic relationships, but if that’s the case, what the hell was Reckoning about? Anyway, “Near Wild Heaven” brings back the sunshine on a song led by Mike Mills; one can’t see Stipe contributing much to this beyond the “ba-ba-ba-bah-bah-bah” chorus. The nearly instrumental “Endgame” resembles nothing too far removed from “please stand by” music on PBS.
Even the band never wants to hear “Shiny Happy People” again. This album’s equivalent to “Stand”, it has been only slightly redeemed by Sesame Street’s revision. “Belong” is an extended jam started on the last tour, a distant cousin of “Superman” giving Stipe a reason to think he could recite his poetry without having to worry about melody. “Half A World Away” reprises the organ and mandolins in something of a retread of “Losing My Religion”. Mike Mills takes the lead again on “Texarkana”, which sports a strong resemblance to latter-day Moody Blues. “Country Feedback” is one of those songs that divides people, and rightfully so. It’s a simple four-chord sequence, repeated with distortion and feedback, layered with pedal steel guitar and Stipe’s stream-of-consciousness vocals, the latter of which would become a growing trend. Our favorite is still “Me In Honey”, a simple strum with a catchy beat, Kate Pierson’s moaning counterpart and an unresolved lyric about a life choice. With all their talk of “progression”, this song is classic R.E.M. just like we want them: guitar, bass and drums with vocals.
As with anything that became hugely popular in the early ‘90s, familiarity has lessened Out Of Time’s excitement over the past two decades (good Lord), but boy, did it sound great when it came out. The boys also didn’t tour behind it, so we were left to scramble to watch any TV appearances, which probably heightened the excitement. These days it seems a little too sunny, and we can forgive that. It didn’t emerge in the friendliest of atmospheres.

R.E.M. Out Of Time (1991)—3½

Byrds 1: Mr. Tambourine Man

2011-09-21T10:09:00.002-04:00

In hindsight, it was highly improbable that the Byrds would have left such an indelible stamp on rock history. They were basically a bunch of folkies who, after seeing A Hard Day’s Night, realized they could make more money by emulating the sounds of the British Invasion. Jim McGuinn (as he was then known) took a shine to the 12-string Rickenbacker he saw George Harrison playing in the movie, so that was different. David Crosby got himself a 12-string too, but chose to concentrate on rhythm and high harmonies. Gene Clark wrote a bunch of songs but was relegated to tambourine onstage. Chris Hillman, previously a mandolinist, learned the bass quickly enough, and Michael Clarke’s haircut got him in the band as long as he learned his way around a drumkit.
Another marketing angle that would have backfired on anyone else was their access and interpretation of Bob Dylan’s songs. While the Byrds weren’t explicitly responsible for his going electric, their amplified renditions certainly proved that his appeal went far beyond the coffeehouse. As a result, folk-rock was invented.
In addition to the title track—which artfully chopped the song down from its four verses into a simple, catchy chorus-verse-chorus format—Mr. Tambourine Man offers three other Dylan classics previously known in their acoustic renditions on Another Side Of Bob Dylan. “Chimes Of Freedom”, “All I Really Want To Do” and “Spanish Harlem Incident” each gain a little something from the blend of electricity and harmonies.
To prove they were more than a jukebox, half of the album was devoted to the boy-meets-girl-loses-girl songs written by Gene Clark. The most famous is still probably “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better”, noticeable from its opening suspended-A strum and its carbon-copy cover by Tom Petty. That said, “Here Without You”, “It’s No Use” and the others prove that he (and the band) were capable of creating commercial pop. Another nod to their folk routes came in their stellar arrangement of Pete Seeger’s “The Bells Of Rhymney”, which itself foreshadowed a later hit. And for another strike for the counterculture, the set closes with a cover of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”, riding the irony of its status as a wartime lament.
If there’s a clunker on the album, it’s “Don’t Doubt Yourself, Babe”, which they didn’t write but cheerfully recorded as a favor. But thanks to those great singles, the chiming Rickenbacker and those stellar harmonies, Mr. Tambourine Man remains a solid album. When their catalog was revamped in the mid-‘90s, there wasn’t much to add outside a few alternate takes. But Gene Clark’s “She Has A Way” deserved better than to be left in the vault, and to prove that these guys could play (despite the studio musicians used on the single) the updated CD now ends with an instrumental backing track to a song never finished.

The Byrds Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)—3½
1996 CD reissue: same as 1965, plus 6 extra tracks

Lou Reed 6: The Blue Mask

2011-09-19T08:43:00.002-04:00

The ‘80s brought some changes in music, while others ignored them. Lou Reed was more concerned with getting sober than anything else, but in the process worked to make his albums more literary if not poetic. For instance, the title track for 1979’s The Bells was said to be a spontaneous performance that he ranks with his best.
For whatever reason—and it couldn’t have been blockbuster record sales—he went back to RCA for The Blue Mask, which works as both a new beginning as well as a continuation of his life’s work. He sounds like he’s trying to bring it back to basics, from the borrowing of the cover photo from Transformer to the basic two guitars, bass and drums (just like the Velvet Underground).
Lou saw each of his albums as chapters in his ongoing Great American Novel, often blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, and here the album is bookended by odes to his then wife Sylvia. “My House” references both his recent marriage and his attempts to contact the spirit of his mentor Delmore Schwartz. The problem is his attempt to apply a melody to his lyrics, almost as an afterthought. “Heavenly Arms” is a doo-wop song in all but arrangement, complete with the use of his wife’s name as the chorus.
More sentimentality is upfront on “The Day John Kennedy Died”, a surprising recount of that event, balanced with an expression of hope for good in a dark world. “Women” opens with a beautifully gentle guitar piece, before turning into an ode to the gender that rides the line between sarcasm and apology for much of his earlier misogynistic work.
His alcoholic ways are explored in “Underneath The Bottle”, but one would hope that the scarier imagery in “The Gun” isn’t from personal experience. “Waves Of Fear” has a great band sound, and while “Average Guy” tries to rise above its jokey punk vocal, its snotty portrait is best left to actual comedians. A little better is “The Heroine”, a solo performance that has only a cosmetic lyrical relation to “Heroin” from the first VU album. The blistering title track is a journey back to the depths of decadence.
If anything, The Blue Mask is a very cohesive album, helped by the band and anchored by the fretless bass of Fernando Saunders (an acquired taste to be sure) and featuring Reed disciple Robert Quine of the Voidoids on the other guitar. It was better than most of his recent work, but it’s hardly a masterpiece.

Lou Reed The Blue Mask (1982)—3

Ben Folds 6: Ben Folds Live

2011-09-16T07:47:00.003-04:00

Whether he’s playing with a band or on his own, every Ben Folds concert offers something different from the previous performance. His encyclopedic knowledge of his own catalog, as well as others, means every setlist is a coin toss, and his love for new and old cheese can lead to any number of improvisations.
So when he puts out a live album culled from a variety of concerts, the selection can almost seem arbitrary, leading one to suspect such a move as being merely financial while he takes his sweet time between new studio albums. But fans should have plenty to appreciate with the simply titled Ben Folds Live, beginning with the sly distortion of his first band’s first album title in the artwork, and continuing with the cover photo itself (documented in a hilarious clip on the accompanying DVD).
It’s just him and a piano, but such is his style that he’s still able to make the rockier songs move. And since the audiences are all devoted fans, it’s easy enough for them to pick up his instructions to emulate some of the arrangements, like the horns on “Army” and the harmonies on “Not The Same”. (The guy from Cake even walks on to add his part to “Fred Jones Part 2”, just like on the album.)
A few rarities are included, like the rarely heard “Silver Street” and the jokey B-side about B-sides, “One Down”. His debt to Elton John is paid on a faithful “Tiny Dancer”, while “Philosophy” is extended to incorporate all kinds of themes for the coda, including Dick Dale’s surf classic “Miserlou”, which the crowd likely knew from watching Pulp Fiction.
As enjoyable as it is for fans, there’s still something incomplete about Ben Folds Live. It’s best illustrated by the inclusion of “Rock This Bitch”, which is kind of his own “Drums In Space” improvisation, and which has been different every time he’s done it. So how could he possibly pick one?

Ben Folds Ben Folds Live (2002)—3

Lou Reed 5: Take No Prisoners

2011-09-14T08:02:00.004-04:00

As the ‘70s dragged on, glam split into punk and disco, and decadence took on new forms. And while he may not have been commercially viable, Lou Reed still confounded the expectations of his record label and challenged fans to keep up with him. In the magazines, he might have even had a nemesis in the form of Lester Bangs, whose continued attempts to corner him might have been considered malicious if he wasn’t such a huge (albeit frustrated) fan.
The middle of the decade brought such notorious albums as Metal Machine Music, over an hour of multi-tracked guitar feedback over four sides. This was followed shortly by Coney Island Baby, an odd collection of softer songs with flashes of sleaze. The highlight is still the title track, a doo-wop influenced look back at his teenage years, complete with a dedication to his old school and someone named Rachel. Even that raised eyebrows—did he really want to “play football for the coach”, and wasn’t Rachel the stubbled transvestite depicted on the cover of the best-of set RCA put out after he switched labels?
That new label was Arista, currently making millions on the back of Barry Manilow, but also taking chances with the likes of Patti Smith. They’d indulge him for a series of iffy albums, of which two stand out. The first was Street Hassle, which used live backing tracks for some sluggish sounds but also sported the cinematic three-part title track, based around insistent bowed cellos, with a bass solo by the auteur(!) and even a cameo by none other than Bruce Springsteen.
But Arista knew that Lou’s real live albums sold the best, so a residency at the Bottom Line led to Take No Prisoners, a two-record set with a fairly apt title. This album presents Lou as his generation’s Don Rickles, paying the barest attention to the songs, choosing instead to bark at or about whoever’s pissing him off at any given moment. The biggest nose-thumb is “Walk On The Wild Side”. Rather than the snappy beat poetry that was a radio staple, here he begins by complaining about the sound crew, club management and promoter, moving on to his critics, and finally starting the song before distracting himself (and the crowd) with the intention to go into further details about how the song came to be and the people inside it. Even that’s barely accomplished, and for sixteen minutes he talks and talks, occasionally punctuated by an actual chorus. Like the best comedy albums, it’s actually pretty entertaining.
But in between the crowd-baiting and general ranting you can hear a patient band keeping up with him, and pulling out some truly amazing performances. He does inhabit each of the monologues on “Street Hassle” for a performance that rivals the original. “Coney Island Baby”, so pretty in its gentle studio cut, is stretched even further here, complete with a few more lines taking about his high school intramural sports experience, getting completely worked up for each lead-in to “the glory of love”, and letting the band drive him for a slamming end. “Berlin” is patterned after the version on his debut, using the chorus but also tapping into the anger of the album the song inspired. And he slows “Satellite Of Love” down to a more leisurely pace, even strapping on a guitar for the distorted chords at the end. (Those last three tracks would comprise one side of 1985’s Arista “hits” collection City Lights, while “Coney Island Baby” was featured on the career-spanning Rock And Roll Diary a few years earlier.)
Take No Prisoners should only appeal to diehard fans, or at least those who like their Lou snarling. Even the packaging played up this side of him, with collages of “shocking” articles about the boy decorating the inner sleeves. If anything, looking at the actual vinyl makes for an interesting comparison with, say, Barry Manilow Live. (Addendum: apparently the cover itself caused a bit of controversy in the world, as explained by one of our faithful readers.)

Lou Reed Take No Prisoners (1978)—3

R.E.M. 8: Green

2011-09-12T07:47:00.003-04:00

It was a fleeting, fascinating time when your favorite band would put out a new album, an eternal year after the last one, and full of anticipation at “what’ll they sound like this time?” you’d sit listening to it over and over again, digesting it, trying to figure where it fit in the pantheon of all that had gone before.
Particularly after the water-treading that was U2’s Rattle & Hum, this was what it was like to experience Green, the new R.E.M. album, released on Election Day 1988 on the verge of the third term of the Reagan administration. It was a big deal for the band, having graduated to Warner Bros. while retaining the producer from their last album. (Not to be outdone, their previous label put out the “hits” collection Eponymous a month in advance, complete with such rarities as the original indie single version of “Radio Free Europe”, a couple of alternate takes and a song used in a movie nobody saw but this commentator, though he’d be happy to be proved otherwise.)
Despite their growing accessibility, there was still a mystery about R.E.M., and as it was becoming easier to understand the words coming out of Stipe’s mouth, it was also easier to concoct wacky theories about their meaning. For the first few months of owning Green we were convinced that it was a concept album sung from the point of view of a disabled and/or retarded child, which only sounded dumber the more we expounded on it. But think about it: “Pop Song 89” is a collection of simple statements, followed by “Get Up”, an escape from dreaming complete with a musical box interlude. “You Are The Everything”—the first overt use of mandolin on an R.E.M. album—looks back to simpler times when you could stretch out in the back seat of a car. The near-nursery rhyme “Stand” would soon become everyone’s least favorite song. Stipe held “World Leader Pretend”, a view of war from a little green army men perspective, to be so important that he actually printed the lyrics in the packaging. And once you get to the competing vocals in “The Wrong Child”, it’s a little unsettling.
“Orange Crush” wasn’t the best choice for lead single, and its title doesn’t help; basically it’s a more mercenary approach to “World Leader Pretend”. Things get really loud on “Turn You Inside Out”, with Mike Mills yelling his harmony in the background. The real standout is “Hairshirt”, one of the band’s prettiest and simplest yet most baffling songs. “I Remember California” follows a doom-laden riff through a foreboding preminition of the end times. It’s the last song listed on the back of the CD case, but wait! Didn’t we see the number 11 on the disc itself, next to a blank space and a time listing? Why yes, there’s another song on the album. Based around the most basic of drum beats—played by Peter Buck, as Bill Berry insisted that it was impossible “to play that stupidly for that long”—the song is listed at the band’s website as “Untitled”, but copyrighted as “11”. It incorporates more intertwined lyrics, and one of the most tender benedictions ever, suitable for all formal occasions: “I made a list of things to say/But all I want to say/All I really want to say is/Hold her and keep him strong/While I’m away from here.”
Familiarity ate away at Green’s luster over time, and the ubiquity of the hits tends to keep it on the shelf. But when taken down for a spin, the better parts still emerge, and it’s hard to believe that it was so long ago. At the same time, it’s easy to see where they’d take themselves over the next few years.

R.E.M. Green (1988)—3½

Asia: Asia and Alpha

2011-09-09T09:28:00.004-04:00

It’s fairly inarguable that Americans and Europeans love cheese. Whether it’s cheddar, Brie, Camembert or Gouda, somebody somewhere is sinking his or her teeth into it and feeling immediate satisfaction. And when it comes to musical cheese of the ‘80s, few morsels are as tasty as Asia.
Based on the ingredients, they might have been considered prog-rock, but a cursory listen to the music they created put paid to that fairly quickly. This was arena-rock plain and simple, and a welcome infusion into the music scene at a time when disco was dead and metal hadn’t become mainstream. It’s very possible that the eponymous debut “saved” the record industry, giving boys in high school parking lots something to talk about until Led Zeppelin’s Coda snuck out that fall.
But it had its roots in prog, causing those family trees to become even more entangled. On bass and lead vocals was John Wetton, who’d made his name with one of the mid-‘70s King Crimson lineups. On drums was Carl Palmer, having shed the albatrosses of Emerson and Lake. The other two guys came from Yes—Steve Howe, who’d been their lead guitarist for all of the ‘70s, and Geoff Downes, who’d been on exactly one Yes album (without Jon Anderson) fresh from the “success” of the Buggles. (The other Buggle, Trevor Horn, kept himself busy producing the band still known as Yes, along with ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and others.)
Asia is masterfully sequenced, putting the first two singles at the top. Anyone who remembers when “Heat Of The Moment” and “Only Time Will Tell” were on constant MTV rotation will have trouble refraining from singing along. Both songs are chock full of fast guitar, keyboard beds and dramatic shifts, and are pure pop. Past that, there’s still high comedy in the way John Wetton never quite hits the high notes on “Sole Survivor” and “One Step Closer”. “Time Again” begins with a painfully plodding riff, speeding up and slowing down before going to full gallop in the song proper.
“Wildest Dreams” begins the second side with the type of suspended chords favored by old Genesis, before finding its base in the electric piano couplets that shortly would be stolen by Bon Jovi on “Runaway”. “Without You” is the requisite sensitive lost love song, while “Cutting It Fine” begins with a tasty acoustic trill soon picked up by the keyboards, then trampled into the relative minor key. More strained high notes carry the song through to its extended dreamy ending. They pull out all the stops for “Here Comes The Feeling”, lifted nearly wholesale from The Who’s “Had Enough”, throwing in several key changes at the end and finishing on a pointedly stupid flourish.

The album was so successful that a follow-up was in order. However, just like Men At Work alongside them, all of the best eggs had seemingly gone in the first basket. Despite the catchiness of “Don’t Cry”, the aching splendor of “The Smile Has Left Your Eyes” and the boneheaded determinism of “My Own Time (I’ll Do What I Want)”, there wasn’t enough quality, real or perceived, to sustain interest in the rest of Alpha. There were two songs based around the metaphor of eyes, and “The Heat Goes On” tries too hard to evoke a connection to “Heat Of The Moment” without being as good. (Though it does have a pretty decent Hammond B-3 solo.)
They were barely out of the gate before having to replace Wetton on the “Asia in Asia” tour with Greg Lake, of all people, who apparently wasn’t thrilled enough with his old comrade to keep his next band from turning into Emerson, Lake and Powell. A very long two years went by before Wetton was back for Astra, but now Steve Howe had gone off to another prog supergroup (the hilarious GTR, which was produced by Geoff Downes) only to be replaced by a guy from Krokus.
Anytime you see Asia these days, you can bet on having Geoff Downes scowling behind his keyboards, but it’s anyone’s guess whether any of the original other three will be along for the ride. Or, you can look for a guy named John Payne, who was the band’s singer in the ‘90s and has managed to ride that rocket this far into the 21st century. But those of us who remember will pull out our copies of the first two albums, once the pride of the fledgling Geffen label, and smile, and then laugh and laugh and laugh.

Asia Asia (1982)—3½
Asia Alpha (1983)—2½

Van Morrison 2: Moondance

2011-09-07T09:44:00.002-04:00

Having found a way to make the music he heard in his head, Van proceeded to record a collection of songs that covered all his interests—jazz, folk, country and even pop. Of all his records—and he’s got a lot—Moondance is still the best place for newbies to start.
In a departure from the esoteric jazz sound of Astral Weeks, the album is overtly catchy, with memorable choruses and hooks aplenty. None so more than “And It Stoned Me”, which seemingly describes a journey to a fishing hole with a stop off at a guy who offers the narrator and his friends a welcome drink of water or something stronger. Whether that something is to be considered sinister is moot for our purposes here; the singer is just happy to reveling in the day and what the moment has to offer. Maybe they’ll even catch something. A pointedly more adult journey is taken on the title track, still one of the most unique tracks ever recorded in the rock era, layered by a jazzy bassline, piano and flute backing. “Crazy Love” is an overt love song, complete with the Sweet Inspirations helping out, just like they would have had he stayed in the “Brown Eyed Girl” mode forever. “Caravan” manages to convey images of a gypsy troupe in the countryside along with the wonder of hearing amazing new and old sounds on American radio. But it’s “Into The Mystic” that crowns it all, a wondrous song about something and nothing, taking joy in whatever it is that’s rocking Van’s gypsy soul. These songs are perfect, and give another reason why the art of the album side must be preserved.
Side two is slightly straighter pop, less deep but still catchy. “Come Running” works in the saxophones that supported the songs on side one, but they were so unobtrusive that they didn’t overwhelm. They continue on “These Dreams Of You”, a nice loping fable that begins in Canada. The Sweet Inspirations return for “Brand New Day”, a wonderful celebration of the same. “Everyone” was famously used for the closing credits of The Royal Tenenbaums, and hearkens back again to his earlier image while hinting at the depth he’d decided to plumb. Which only makes the jumping bass of “Glad Tidings”, an early clue to the new direction, all the more welcome.
Again, Moondance is a solid pop album. If anything, its relationship with its predecessor can be compared to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, wherein the latter softened the delivery to make the message more palatable. Even if that was his intention, he wouldn’t admit it, but he would rarely attempt to be so universally accessible going forward. (And if you’re looking for further distraction from his longtime image, take a gander at the liner notes, written by his then-wife with the alliterative hippie name. It’s quite a leap from the Van who’s best known for being grumpy and lonesome.)

Van Morrison Moondance (1970)—3½

Television 2: Adventure

2011-09-05T08:53:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time, record labels weren’t as quick to dump people from their rosters if they hadn’t sold millions of copies of their records. This was certainly the case of a smaller label like Elektra, which, despite having the distribution power of the Warner conglomerate, still maintained a lean but choice stable of performers. So it was that Television recorded and released their second album to even less of a ripple than their first.
Chances are, even the handful of people who were excited to have another Television album might have been disappointed at first, as Adventure doesn’t seem as groundbreaking as Marquee Moon. And how could it be? Instead, Tom Verlaine concocted some relatively tame compositions, yet still loaded with melody and interlocking guitar parts. “Glory” is a rocking opener, but things immediately get softer for “Days”. “Foxhole” follows along in the tradition of “Friction”, a little harder and loaded with war metaphors. “Careful” is a misleading title for a song whose main motif is “I don’t care”; likewise, the production buffs a lot of potential edge of it. The shimmering “Carried Away” adds piano and organ into the mix, and one suspects the Patti Smith Group might have enjoyed this one.
The second side is dominated by two “epics”, with a classic in the middle. “The Fire” sports a whistling intro right out of a horror movie, which both accentuates and deflates the drama of the song. The chords of the chorus elevates the song past the rather ordinary verses. “Ain’t That Nothin’” is the album’s masterpiece, a compact distillation of the best parts of Marquee Moon, with a great lyric on top. (It was also the album’s single, which nobody bought either.) “The Dream’s Dream” fades in on a flourish, plays without vocals for a couple of minutes, then turns left for the verse before continuing on the theme prior for the last half of the track, building and building, then hushing again for a more meditative vamp through the fade.
There’s nothing wrong with Adventure; it simply doesn’t deliver the excitement of its predecessor. Still, for anyone who loves Marquee Moon—and you know who you are—the album deserves a place in the rack next to its brother. And with Rhino’s upgraded version of the album, you get liner notes and bonus tracks, such as the long-lost title track, an early take of “Glory” and two alternates of “Ain’t That Nothin’”—the single mix and a nearly ten-minute instrumental take not listed in the packaging.

Television Adventure (1978)—3½
2003 expanded CD: same as 1978, plus 4 extra tracks

Monkees 6: Head

2011-09-02T10:44:00.002-04:00

The Monkees film Head was designed to explode their image, and on that level it was successful. Throughout its 85 minutes the Pre-Fab Four skewer their caricatures, get sucked into a giant vaccum cleaner, are trapped in a variety of boxes, get torn limb from limb and even attempt suicide off a bridge. Despite having no real plot, it can be considered an extended version of the TV show, right down to the same lettering on the credits. But there are teenage musical interludes, just like on the show, and because it was the law, there was a soundtrack album.
Head can be considered the last real Monkees album, as it was the last to feature all four members for the better part of thirty years. However, it’s a stretch to call it a Monkees album at all, since the handful of actual songs are interspersed with incidental music, dialogue and effects from the film (sometimes repeated) making for a very disjointed listening experience even if you had watched the film ahead of time.
Like said film, the album starts promisingly enough with a montage leading into the exquisite “Porpoise Song”, with its majestic psychedelic swirl, about something and nothing all at the same time. A spoken nursery rhyme parodies the “hey hey we’re the Monkees” theme song, before giving way to Mike’s “Circle Sky”. While it was performed live by the Monkees themselves for the movie, the studio version was recorded with session guys, and it’s a little tighter, as can be imagined.
Unfortunately, this is where the good part ends. “As We Go Along” is a Goffin/King composition chirped by Micky, while Davy gets to tap-dance all over “Daddy’s Song”, another uncomfortably personal Nilsson song. Peter finally gets two songs on an album, but they’re the quasi-mystical “Can You Dig It?” (accompanied by an embarrassing sequence in the film featuring Micky as a sheik) and the fitting “Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?”, both leftovers from the sessions for the last album. Neil Young’s buried in there somewhere, too.
Peter would leave the band soon after filming the band’s phenomenally hideous 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee TV spectacular, leaving the other three (then just two) to continue making albums and touring. It’s a shame that Head is the end of the line, considering the promise they showed only a year before. Still, Monkeemaniacs hold their entire catalog in high esteem, and likely are still drooling about Rhino’s Deluxe Edition, expanded to three CDs, and possibly the most elaborate re-packaging of seven songs that weren’t that good to begin with.

The Monkees Head (1968)—2½
1994 reissue CD: same as 1966, plus 6 extra tracks
2010 Deluxe Edition: same as 1994, plus 38 extra tracks

R.E.M. 7: Document

2011-08-31T08:04:00.003-04:00

Right on schedule, back when bands put a new album every twelve months, R.E.M. emerged with a closer bid for superstardom, while preserving a love for wacky sounds. Document is a progression like everything else, with a bright and accessible rock sound, slightly more confident vocals and tantalizing lyrics, when you could understand them.
Their determination is established on “Finest Worksong”, which manages to rock on a single chord for most of the verses. Then it’s a dip into politics for “Welcome To The Occupation”, which likely escaped understanding even more than “Exhuming McCarthy”, complete with the legendary testimony mixed into the bridge. “Disturbance At The Heron House” isn’t the first song to compare humans to animals. A little comic relief comes on a cover of Wire’s “Strange”, another song that could be one of their own. The album’s most unlikely hit remains “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, still a great title and a great performance.
Then again, “The One I Love” shouldn’t have been as successful as it was, given to its repetition and easily confused sentiment. “Fireplace” is an off-kilter waltz, but not as jarring as “Lightnin’ Hopkins”, which could be described as U2’s October filtered through Georgia. “King Of Birds”, lush with exotic acoustic touches, is a lovely song, before the feedback and doom of “Oddfellows Local 151”, which gives Stipe another reason to work “fire” into a lyric.
Document doesn’t sound as unique today, given its familiarity and rash of imitators. In many ways, this is where some of their fickle fans began to think of them as sellouts. But it’s easy to be spoiled when your favorite band puts out an album every year.

R.E.M. Document (1987)—3½

Ben Folds 5: Rockin’ The Suburbs

2011-08-29T09:02:00.002-04:00

The Five had disbanded a year earlier (though you could tell on their last album they were getting bored) so fans anxiously awaited Ben’s grand statement of independence. In its place we got Rockin’ The Suburbs, an album full of tracks that could well have been recorded by the band. Tellingly, he plays the bulk of the instruments, including drums, distorto bass and some guitar.
If there was anything new in his approach since the band stopped, it was a preponderance of songs written in the third person starting from the titles. “Annie Waits” is a lonely spinster of the “Eleanor Rigby”/“Another Day” school, but “Zak And Sara” takes a wacky trip in time to predict the musical horrors that will follow. The first great song comes in “Still Fighting It”, an imagined conversation between father and son that remains both effective and futile. “Gone” is another rousing kiss-off to a former paramour. “Fred Jones Part 2” is an amazingly touching portrait of a reluctant retiree, and fans would have recognized this particular character from a song on Whatever And Ever Amen. The flipside comes on “The Ascent Of Stan”, a look at a person who hasn’t aged as gracefully.
With each track his musical depth grows and grows, as evidenced on “Losing Lisa”, a remarkably insightful glimpse at the end of a relationship that’s eclipsed by the song that follows. “Carrying Cathy” takes a couple of verses to paint a picture of a somewhat needy person, before detouring into an impressionistic bridge colored by just enough strings over a wordless chorus. The song expertly drops out to accompany a vivid image of people “carrying a box through the rain”, fulfilling the threat of the song’s title. Then it’s a trip (pun intended) to the aftermath of a party in “Not The Same”, which would provide some of the world’s better audience participation over the years. The title track nicely skewers the current state of white rap, and we’d like to think it’s one reason why Fred Durst doesn’t sell anymore. “Fired” is an odd one; it appears to be a rant from an angry boss, but ends as if it was merely an excuse to write a song based around the final twelve-letter obscenity. But in keeping with his M.O., he gives the last word to tenderness in “The Luckiest”, a wedding song for the 21st century.
Arguably, the best songs on Rockin’ The Suburbs are the depressing ones, much to the dismay of those who liked the funny ones better. He gave himself a tough line to walk, stuck between the role of a compelling songwriter with a musical comedian. But as ever, no matter what his songs make you think, they also tap your toes.

Ben Folds Rockin’ The Suburbs (2001)—3½

Monkees 5: The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees

2011-08-26T07:29:00.003-04:00

The TV show was all but finished, but the Monkees still had the time and the clout to keep recording for albums. The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees, which was released the month after the last episode aired, is incredibly disjointed, both in concept and history. Each of the members worked alone, and in increasingly opposite directions. And Peter, the one who loved being in a band most of all, isn’t heard anywhere, despite using the likes of Stephen Stills and Buddy Miles on his sessions.
Davy is prominent on the first side. “Dream World” has a decent rock backing, but’s it unfortutunately dated by brass and strings. “We Were Made For Each Other” is more typical syrup with too much harpsichord. In between, “Auntie’s Municipal Court” is a simple three-chord country lope with inexplicable Nesmith lyrics to match the nonsensical title, but being sung by Micky, it’s not that far out at all. “Tapioca Tundra” is just plain odd, signaled by pointedly off-key whistling before escalating into another Nesmith attempt at poetry over a Latin beat. First heard as a B-side (where it belonged), it still managed to hit the top 40. “Daydream Believer”, recorded for the previous album but released as a single instead, finally appears, complete with the jokey slate opening. It’s still a great single, even if those trumpets do sound too much like the Partridge Family. Then there’s “Writing Wrongs”, which begins with a big studio sound anchored by a promising piano part, then takes a two-minute detour into a pointless jam over the same chord, with a couple of flatted-fifths thrown in at random for an attempt at jazz.
Side two offers a few carrots for longtime fans. “I’ll Be Back Upon My Feet” and “Valleri” had both been featured on the TV show, so new re-recordings are used here. Davy’s “The Poster” is a questionable rewrite of “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!”, but without the menace. Similarly, “P.O. Box 9847” uses Beatlesque production technique for a song written as a personal ad. Nez tries again to defy conventional record making with “Magnolia Simms”, which managed to predict “Honey Pie”, complete with surface noise, but McCartney wouldn’t have included a skipping or scratching effect, or put it only in one channel. Micky gets the last word with the anti-war “Zor And Zam”, which was also prominent in the last episode of the TV show, which he happened to direct.
Considering the disparate sounds here, it’s amazing that The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees was remotely good, or even successful. They were, however, able to choose from dozens of songs attempted throughout the sessions. (So much so that when Rhino released a limited deluxe expansion of the album, it stretched to three full CDs, including tons of alternates and outtakes along with the stereo and mono LP.) Sadly, there were even some songs recorded during the sessions that would have made the album better, but they were being held over for the soundtrack of their upcoming feature film.

The Monkees The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees (1968)—3
1994 reissue CD: same as 1968, plus 5 extra tracks
2010 Deluxe Edition: same as 1994, plus 71 extra tracks

R.E.M. 6: Dead Letter Office

2011-08-24T11:14:00.001-04:00

R.E.M.’s fans could have easily contained their first four albums on two Maxell 90-minute tapes, with room for the various other songs that had creeped out on B-sides. All of a sudden, the band made their search a lot easier with Dead Letter Office, a collection of such rarities. Such a thing wasn’t as common for an active band, but the band, record store geeks all, would have certainly been familiar with similar compilations by Elvis Costello and The Clash. And despite Peter Buck’s self-deprecating liner notes, it’s a highly cohesive album.
Said liner notes make the point that a B-side tends to be a dumping ground for half-assed performances captured on tape that wouldn’t fit on an album. So like any other band, R.E.M. recorded their share of covers in the early days. Three of them were Velvet Underground songs, and their mostly acoustic takes on “There She Goes Again”, “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Femme Fatale” might have turned the unsuspecting on to that band. “Crazy” was borrowed from the Athens band Pylon, though it could easily have been an original. Their take on Aerosmith’s “Toys In The Attic” is a hoot, but in a different way from the drunken stab at “King Of The Road”, which apparently none of the band knew all the way through.
Of the songs they did write, perhaps they might not have fit onto the albums, but they still are of quality. Especially entertaining is “Voice Of Harold”, a legendary early take of “Seven Chinese Brothers” sung using the words from the back cover of an obscure gospel album. “Burning Down” and “Ages Of You” may be rewrites of the same song, but each would be fun to hear live. “Burning Hell” matches a plodding riff with a strangled vocal that spews such gems as “women got legs, men got pants/you got the picnic I got the ants”. A few instrumentals show off the band’s tightness, and even “Bandwagon”, another reaction to constant touring, manages to charm.
The album wasn’t a huge commercial hit, but it was never meant to be. But in a very smart move, the CD version included as a bonus the entire Chronic Town EP, which to date was only available on LP or cassette. It makes a nice inclusion, and really does enhance the collection. The five songs are a little more tentative than what would comprise Murmur, the standout being “Gardening At Night”. Should Dead Letter Office be updated as part of the band’s current 25th Anniversary archival program, Chronic Town could certainly anchor a second disc with the remaining handful of live takes and other rarities from those early days.

R.E.M. Dead Letter Office (1987)—4
1987 CD: same as above, plus 5 extra tracks

Van Morrison 1: Astral Weeks

2011-08-22T08:50:00.001-04:00

While he’d been a recording artist for a while, and even been on the pop charts as a solo artist, Astral Weeks was Van Morrison’s first real album, and that’s where we’re going to start.
It’s not the kind of album that grabs you immediately; like many of the great ones, it slowly sinks into your brain until you simply have to have it. It’s a late-night narcotic that evokes autumn. As a statement of art, it’s divided not in sides, but into “Part One: In The Beginning” and “Part Two: Afterwards”. Most of the accompanists are jazz guys, adding to the mood.
The title track begins with a simple bass run over two chords, setting the stage for Van to rap a stream of consciousness that barely rhymes, like a train traveling over the green hills before coming to the stop where he gets off. “Beside You” begins very quietly and stays there, a rambling acoustic guitar strummed beneath seemingly disconnected verses. It’s a very seductive sound, especially when compared to the earlier, more rocking version that would emerge after Van got big. After those, “Sweet Thing” is almost conventional, with its easy-to-follow structure and penetrable lyric. It’s a misleading setup for “Cyprus Avenue”, one of dozens of reveries of his hometown he’d record over his career. It’s a simple twelve-bar blues, but presented in such an unique way, with his voice changing on every line. (The jury’s still out on whether the narrator is a pedophile or not.)
“The Way Young Lovers Do” sounds a little too much of its era, but succeeds thanks to the wonderful bridge heard twice and the first mention of gardens wet with rain. He’d learn to arrange horns better before long. To this day the most discussed song on the album is “Madame George”, a song Van has refused to explain adequately. It begins, again, on Cyprus Avenue, following a simple I-IV-V chord sequence through observations of a party, ruminations on the noun and verb form of love, and finally taking the train away from it all. The love song to a “Ballerina” is achingly gentle and sweet, another simple structure enhanced by an amazing performance. “Slim Slow Slider” follows the blues pattern even further with death imagery and blatant acknowledgement, before ending abruptly with a saxphone flourish that fades. (Allegedly the take went on even longer, giving myth to another musical Holy Grail that’s probably better on paper than it is to the ears.)
Astral Weeks is a slow burner, one that once you “get”, you understand that it truly is all good. This is where the legend of Caledonia soul, the Belfast Cowboy all began—gardens wet with rain, tree-lined streets, thinking back to simpler days and immersing oneself in literature and music.

Van Morrison Astral Weeks (1968)—4½

Tom Waits 10: Rain Dogs

2011-08-19T07:05:00.005-04:00

Tom moved his new family to New York City, where he fell in with a set of unique musicians and recorded Rain Dogs. The album is nearly flawless, running the gamut from old ballads to rock songs, infused with the new carnival sound he’d started developing on Swordfishtrombones. Loaded with nineteen tracks, it’s one of his best.
“Singapore” stumbles in to immediately show off the latest weapons in his arsenal: guitarist Marc Ribot and percussionist Michael Blair, the latter of whom utilized hubcaps and industrial pipe over the usual congas and tambourines. “Clap Hands” is something of a fractured nursery rhyme, taken to an even further extreme on “Cemetery Polka”, with its litany of creepy uncles and their unappreciative offspring. “Jockey Full Of Bourbon” is a swampy little rhumba, a perfect match for its use in the film Down By Law. The broken-finger piano returns for “Tango Till They’re Sore”, something of a farewell speech in the middle of side one. “Big Black Mariah” sounds a little more standard, thanks in part to Keith Richards on guitar, before giving way to the spooky lullaby cadence of “Diamonds & Gold”. “Hang Down Your Head” is rocking yet mournful, just as “Time” is tender and sweet.
An accordion opens side two before bringing in the clatter of the title track. The minute-long instrumental “Midtown” perfectly captures the sound of the city in this or any decade. “9th and Hennepin” is a spoken visit to a donut shop somewhere in Minneapolis, before we go deep into the woods for “Gun Street Girl”. Keith returns to add guitar to “Union Square”, but he’s used to much better effect on “Blind Love”, as straight a country song as you’ll find here. “Walking Spanish” is a little on the ordinary side (for him) but who could have predicted that “Downtown Train” would become such a huge hit for so many other people? “Bride Of Rain Dog” is another instrumental interlude before we get the real farewell speech, New Orleans funeral-style, in “Anywhere I Lay My Head”.
With over 53 minutes of music, Rain Dogs offers a lot at once, but for the Waits newcomer, it’s an excellent place to start. Without the slightest hint of his drunken troubadour image, it sounds like nothing he’d done in the ‘70s, yet as ever, he wasn’t about to follow any recent trends. Best of all, the album hangs together very well as an album, making it a pleasure from start to finish.

Tom Waits Rain Dogs (1985)—5

Monkees 4: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.

2011-08-17T07:25:00.003-04:00

The Monkees had managed to stay a viable commercial product even after the Summer of Love, which they embraced with nutty anarchy on TV. And having established their autotonomy as a self-contained that could write, perform and record their own songs on Headquarters, what did they do? They started working as solo artists within the group context, before the Beatles even, augmenting their own sessions with handpicked professional musicians. From this anarchic setup came Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., helped by songs recently heard on the show as well as a couple of hit singles.
Mike dominates the proceedings on the album, beginning with the not-so-ambiguous “Salesman”. “The Door Into Summer” is a nice folky lope, with its fairy tale imagery and nice high harmonies from Micky. He’d go further towards country with “What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round”, which he didn’t write, nor are the Byrds playing on it. “Love Is Only Sleeping” simmers with a bit of psychedelia, while “Don’t Call On Me” predicts the MOR sound of 1968.
Despite Micky’s competent drumming on Headquarters, here he’s content to let somebody else handle it, and sing whatever’s given him. “Words” is a re-recording of a Boyce/Hart song from the first season, the lead vocals shared with Peter, who only otherwise appears on a spoken piece shortly before the phenomenal “Pleasant Valley Sunday”. (Mike’s playing that infectious riff, by the way.) Micky’s biggest contribution to the album is the debut of the Moog synthesizer, which chirps all over “Daily Nightly” up against his own histrionic vocal. Another, more musical embellishement is added to “Star Collector”.
Despite such strides, the band would always be seen as a teenybopper group. Truth be told, it wasn’t their own musicianship (or lack thereof) that denied them respect from their peers; in truth, it was Davy. The songs he chose as his showpieces were so corny they’d make Paul McCartney blush. “She Hangs Out” is a rerecording (again) of another leftover from the Kirshner days, but “Hard To Believe” came from the little guy’s own pen. “Cuddly Toy”, a Harry Nilsson composition, has something of a vaudeville approach, but at least all four Monkees play on it.
The occasional wince nonetheless, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. still qualifies as a “good” Monkees album, but the schizophrenia that would soon dominate their recording seessions has already begun to emerge. Each of the Rhino reissues is bolstered mostly by alternate mixes of the songs, with the only real extra being Micky’s breathless James Brown-styled showpiece “Goin’ Down”, a contemporary B-side.

The Monkees Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. (1967)—3½
1995 reissue CD: same as 1967, plus 6 extra tracks
2007 Deluxe Edition: same as 1967, plus 25 extra tracks

Ben Folds 4: The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner

2011-08-15T07:14:00.002-04:00

It’s always tough when a band that’s built its reputation on wackiness puts out material that’s anything less than hilarious. The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner certainly sounded like the Five all the way through, but its grandiose presentation suggested they were trying to tell some kind of dark, impenetrable story that flew right over our heads.
“Narcolepsy” opens with a fanfare lasting nearly a minute and a half, before paring back to the basic melody for the song to actually start. “Don’t Change Your Plans” allegedly had a lengthy intro of its own that was lopped off at the mixing stage. If that’s the case it would be great to hear what we’re missing, because the song that’s left is a sadly exquisite look at (again) the end of a relationship, complete with another Bacharachian bridge. By the time “Mess” comes in, the protagonist of this particular rock opera is coming off as somewhat of a jerk, despite the tasty electric piano bridge. “Magic”, written by drummer Darren Jessee, is a melancholy farewell to either an ex or the recently deceased, juxtaoposed by the interior monologue in “Hospital Song”.
Things finally pick up with “Army”, an easy crowd favorite due to its snotty, cursing lyrics and do-it-yourself horn section. A reference to a redneck past provides a strange foreshadowing of the song of the same name, wherein more skewering of modern pop culture is shackled to a noisy, pounding arrangement. “Your Most Valuable Possession” sets an answering machine tape to a jazz backing. More reminiscences from an unreliable narrator make up “Regrets”, which rotates around the same changes until the three-minute mark where Wings meets the Flaming Lips. Speaking of odd influences, “Jane” owes a little something to Steely Dan before turning into another mellow Ben Folds Five song. The finale comes in “Lullabye”, a dream constructed so well you can almost see the credits rolling on the imaginary screen.
The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner is certainly a daring album, and it has its moments, but it falls off halfway on its journey to becoming something truly important. As the band’s last album, it wasn’t the best swan song either.

Ben Folds Five The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner (1999)—3

Joni Mitchell 9: Hejira

2011-08-12T08:13:00.002-04:00

Depending on what source you read, a hejira is defined as a “migration” or “flight from danger”. Both can be similarly described as “escape”, which itself can be taken as running for one’s life or just getting away from it all. Much conjecture has been made of what exactly inspired this collection of weary road songs; the facts are that she had spent some time on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, she’d done a brief tour supporting her last album, she started and ended a variety of love affairs, and she took a cross-country car trip.
That feeling of movement, of being conveyed somewhere is apparent throughout Hejira. Some of the L.A. Express are still here, but there’s more Larry Carlton on lead guitar in the mix (a counter to Joni’s own electric rhythm, still in tunings of her own design). The biggest contribution comes from Jaco Pastorius on bass, giving the album as a whole—and particularly the phenomenal title track—a distinct ECM feel.
“Coyote” might be most familiar to people who’ve seen her perform it in The Last Waltz, a teasing tribute to another rugged man who’s stolen her heart. It takes a few listens before understanding that “Amelia” celebrates Amelia Earhart, another female pioneer who left a trail few could attempt to follow. Next stop is Memphis, where an encounter with a blues musician inspires “Furry Sings The Blues” and Neil Young adds an atonal harmonica. Yet she still finds herself drawn to “A Strange Boy”, despite his immaturity. The title track, again, is an absolute masterpiece, ringing with her retuned guitar and Jaco’s bass wandering this way and that.
An open letter to a childhood friend who supposedly has the life Joni thought she’d lead provides the basis for “Song For Sharon”, a lengthy, time-hopping reflection. The most experimental track is “Black Crow”, with very jagged rhythm guitar providing the rhythm while Jaco and Larry Carlton dance amid her vocal. With “Blue Motel Room” she’s finally written her own Annie Ross torch song. Listen for how her voice perfectly imitates a group of muted trumpets on the instrumental break. “Refuge Of The Roads” is a wonderful conclusion, wherein she almost seems to accept her position, if not her fate.
Throughout the album she sounds more tired than ever, and that’s much of the point of Hejira. As stated so perfectly in “All I Want”, she is, after all, always going to be on a lonely road, traveling, traveling, traveling.

Joni Mitchell Hejira (1976)—4

R.E.M. 5: Lifes Rich Pageant

2011-08-10T07:38:00.002-04:00

Having employed a more subtle approach on their previous album, the band went into the other direction for their fourth album in four years. Lifes Rich Pageant was produced by Don Gehman, who got most of his notoriety for his best-selling work with The Artist Then Known As John Cougar Mellencamp. Despite the assumptions of that sound, the result was a logical progression in the band’s career.
The big sound is apparent from the start, thanks to another great riff on the chugging “Begin The Begin”. Even Stipe’s vocals are more upfront, more assured, if no more explicable. “These Days” continues the assault with an anthem made for arenas. They mix their greatest acoustic and electric strengths for “Fall On Me”, the perfect first single. The three different vocal parts complement each other perfectly. “Cuyahoga” is another song addressing environmental concerns—not exactly in vogue in 1986—though it’s not exactly clear what the hell “Hyena” is about, outside of the opening sound effect and the title yelled as a chorus. Just to show they weren’t all serious, the side ends with the wacky “Underneath The Bunker”, a quasi-Greek surf instrumental with bullhorn vocals at the end.
Side two is a little more subdued, at first anyway. “The Flowers Of Guatemala” might be political, or it might now, but it definitely sounds like The Velvet Underground. “I Believe” starts with a jaunty banjo before exploding into another great arena-rocker. “What If We Give It Away?” is more midtempo before they turn it up to thrash speed for “Just A Touch”. “Swan Swan H” gives them a chance to reflect on the folkier sound of the last album, giving budding acoustic players more fodder for their campus hootenannies. And what sounds like a toy wound up too fast provides the lead-in for “Superman”, borrowed from an obscure ‘60s B-side and made into their own.
Lifes Rich Pageant truly brought R.E.M. a little closer to nationwide favor, but it still didn’t set the world on fire. That wouldn’t happen until their next album, leading many longtime fans to insist that this one was their last good album, fulfilling the prophecy of The First Four.
As with the Fables reissue, the album was given the grandiose 25th anniversary repackage in a little box with a poster, postcards, new liner notes and a bonus disc of “Athens Demos”. Every song that ended up on the album save “Superman” were tried out ahead of time, and it’s clear how prepared the band, if not Stipe, was before heading into the studio proper. Mike Mills already has many of his harmonies in place, and Peter Buck only gets lost once per instrumental take. Along with early stabs at “King Of Birds” and “Bad Day”, they even run through some older original songs that display both their garage band roots and their strengths as an actual band.

R.E.M. Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)—4½
2011 25th Anniversary Edition: same as 1986, plus 19 extra tracks

Ben Folds 3: Naked Baby Photos

2011-08-08T07:25:00.001-04:00

The band’s original label decided to cash in as best they could on the sudden if moderate success of Whatever And Ever Amen with what amounted to a rarities collection. Granted, there were various live tracks and B-sides already stockpiled, but the timing was about as questionable as the dance remix albums earlier in the decade from Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli. Chances are, though, the band would have loved to be in such company. (Ben even went so far as to write up some notes for the package.)
Naked Baby Photos is split between studio and live material, and both angles run from the sublime to the ridiculous. Three outtakes from the first album—the poignant “Eddie Walker”, the jaunty “Tom And Mary” and the acoustic guitar-driven “Ameline”, which is what kept it in the can—sit alongside the homemade single version of “Jackson Cannery” that got them signed. Then there’s “For Those Of Ya’ll Who Wear Fanny Packs”, a six-minute jam that skewers funk and hip-hop, and is only slightly funny the first time through.
The live half offers straight covers from the debut, plus a version of the ever-evolving “Song For The Dumped” and a lovely cover of “Twin Falls” by Built To Spill. But there are also two near-metal pastiches that were, again, probably more fun at the time for the people involved.
That said, Naked Baby Photos served as a decent stopgap while the band prepared their next real album. And their increasingly rabid fan base was happy to buy anything they put out. Anyone else would be advised to stay away.

Ben Folds Five Naked Baby Photos (1998)—3

Joe Jackson 10: Blaze Of Glory

2011-08-05T08:40:00.003-04:00

Joe’s fascination with the LP as an entity continued on his next real album, a look back at his generation’s progress. Although he insisted it wasn’t a concept album (“it’s not the f—king Wall, for f—k’s sake,” he would tell impatient audiences), Blaze Of Glory is a song cycle, programmed in such a way that each track, while different than the next, has a built-in segue that set the sound of its successor. The use of lead vocalists other than himself also makes it more of a Big Production than the average rock album.
As had become his approach, the album ranges from rock to lush pop, sometimes within the same track. “Tomorrow’s World” fades in with an expression of wonder at what technology can bring, with pointed references to what didn’t come to fruition. “Me And You (Against The World)” gives a glimpse at the first brush with romance, followed by the determination of success in the big city espoused in “Down To London”, which features one of the better fake harmonicas as played on a synthsizer. The dreams, however, are already tarnished with the regret in “Sentimental Thing” (not sung by Joe, and its melody already used on the Tucker soundtrack). We’re not sure where the instrumental “Acropolis Now” fits into the story, except that one of its themes sounds borrowed from the title track of another concept album, Quadrophenia. “Blaze Of Glory” has a great backing track, but the words are basically a rewrite of Bad Company’s “Shooting Star”, right down to the metaphor and protagonist’s name. A not-so-subtle nod to “On Broadway” closes out the side.
While he may not have intended to allude to so many songs known in the common vernacular, there’s no escaping the similarity of “Rant And Rave” to “Footloose”, despite its 6/4 meter and detours into sleazy jazz. The relentless drums segue nicely into the intro of “Nineteen Forever”, one of his greatest and most unjustifiably ignored singles. It’s a wonderful ‘60s pop pastiche, with just the right amount of horns, exuberant vocals and even a Coral electric sitar. The determination to stay eternally young is exemplified in the extended fake live ending, complete with shouts of “one more time”. Instead, a lone trumpet leads into “The Best I Can Do”, another trademark vague love song with a vocal that still reminds us of Steve Martin. “Evil Empire” is a not-so-subtle slap at American policy at a time when Reagan was still seemingly universally beloved, and for those not impressed with the album thus far, “Discipline” is sure to seal its fate. Based on an intentionally annoying drum and bass loop, it weaves in horns, spoken excerpts and vintage keyboards into a maddening display of automation, broken only by a smooth jazz interlude. Those listening on CD would be rewarded by skipping ahead to the closing “Human Touch”, another aching piano ballad with a heartbreaking violin and a vocal arrangement reminiscent of the Righteous Brothers.
Blaze Of Glory is not immediately accessible, taking a few listens to catch hold. Some of it could easily be shaved in favor of the songs as opposed holding up the story. Unfortunately for him, it was not a huge success outside his fan base, and the label that had supported him for so long dropped him in the next music industry consolidation. (In a cut in the running for the unkindest, Jon Bon Jovi put out an album the following year with the same title and sold a few more copies.)

Joe Jackson Blaze Of Glory (1989)—3

Television 1: Marquee Moon

2011-08-03T07:30:00.003-04:00

Not every band that came out of the CBGB’s scene during the advent of punk was as easy to describe as just that. For example, the band Television, despite having a distinct edgy sound covered in New York City grime, weren’t about loud and fast. Their songs were intricate, and particularly in the construction of the guitar parts, as played by main songwriter Tom Verlaine and musical foil Richard Lloyd on a variety of Fenders. Their sound was closer to Talking Heads than the Ramones, but never enjoyed the commercial success of those bands. Still, they managed to leave us with a classic debut, the wonderous Marquee Moon. These eight songs fill up 45 minutes so well—just right for one side of a 90-minute Maxell—and haven’t dated in the least.
“See No Evil” is a perfect starter, balancing a chugging rhythm in one channel and a spiraling riff in the other. Verlaine’s strangled voice is an acquired taste, but he gets so much joy out of the words he sings. The shouted backing vocals help too, as they do on “Venus”, with the striking image “I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo”. “Friction” is a great garage band song, using basic chords, a wonderful dissonant main riff and an equally chaotic solo. The masterpiece of the album is the title track, which features three existential verses bookended by the simplest of riffs. After the third chorus, the riff starts again to support a majestic solo, as the band follows, matching the dynamics note by note. An incredibly primitive attack explodes into a reverie with almost birdlike sounds, then it all starts again with a repeat of the first verse. (On the original LP the song faded at the ten-minute mark, so it was a discovery akin to a holy grail when the first and all subsequent CDs extended the song for another minute to a full ending.)
Another simple rhythm part starts “Elevation”, a minor-key marvel with a fascinatingly interrupeted meter. The band allows themselves one pretty song with “Guiding Light”, which somehow manages to sound like some of the slower songs by the Rolling Stones. A reggae strum underpins “Prove It”, and after a while you notice the wonderful bassline Fred Smith concocted. (It bears mentioning that drummer Billy Ficca holds down the fort expertly.) The weakest song is the last, the lengthy and tortured “Torn Curtain”, but just because it’s not up to the level of the rest doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.
Marquee Moon is not an easy album to sum up, nor is it easy to convince others of its splendor. People raised on Clapton, Stevie Ray and other guitar heroes may not appreciate it right away, but you can hear its influence in U2, the White Stripes and Radiohead. Too edgy for radio, too polite for punk, it’s not yet new wave, but it is rock ‘n roll. (One of Rhino’s better reissues was the expanded version of this album, which added three alternate takes, an unfinished instrumental, and the complete seven-minute version of “Little Johnny Jewel”, their first indie single.)

Television Marquee Moon (1977)—5
2003 expanded CD: same as 1977, plus 5 extra tracks

Ben Folds 2: Whatever And Ever Amen

2011-08-01T08:29:00.002-04:00

Major-label support meant that the second album from the Ben Folds Five got a little more attention, but the music scene wasn’t about to embrace a piano-driven trio no matter how fuzzy the bass was. Still, the boys stepped up to the plate with Whatever And Ever Amen. The album boasted even more intellectually biting lyrics alongside some quieter moments, and even managed a hit with “Brick”, a song that gives chills on the first listen, and will still do so even after one realizes that the song’s about accompanying your girlfriend to an abortion clinic.
“One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces” is a wonderful riposte of a one-time bullied geek enjoying his “fame”. Unfortunately, “Fair” takes a little too much time with the same chords and lyrics to highlight the boys’ harmonies. The somber “Brick” is defused by “Song For The Dumped” with its adamant “give me my money back” chorus. “Selfless, Cold And Composed” has a jazzy Bacharach feel and nice string accents, but again, takes too long. But all is well when the ode to “Kate” gallops into the speakers.
The second half of the album straddles heaviness and silliness. “Smoke” wanders around a 3/4 meter under a melodica, whilc the unrelated “Cigarette” is almost a Tom Waits pastiche, with its lonesome barroom piano and ironic plotline. “Steven’s Last Night In Town” is a hilarious portrait of a guest who stays too long, embellished by members of the Klezmatics. The attitude continues on with “Battle Of Who Could Care Less”, sealing his status as spokesman for jaded twentysomethings. The final two songs—“Missing The War” and “Evaporated” get very quiet and a little sad, despite occasional dynamic punctuations from the band.
Alternately hilarious and poignant, Whatever And Ever Amen was a strong follow-up that took a while to catch on to the masses. When it did, it would become the band’s biggest hit. A later expanded version restored some of the audio-verité elements that had disappeared from all but the first pressings, along with a hilarious hidden track. And of course, there were a few bonuses in the form of B-sides like the instrumental “Theme From ‘Dr. Pyser’”, a faithful cover of “Video Killed The Radio Star” and the wonderful “Air”, written for the inexplicable big-budget Godzilla movie.

Ben Folds Five Whatever And Ever Amen (1997)—3½
2005 expanded, remastered CD: same as 1997, plus 7 extra tracks

Velvet Underground 5: Max’s Kansas City and 1969

2011-07-29T07:06:00.002-04:00

While their LPs weren’t huge sellers, many people who spoke fondly of the Velvet Underground over the years did so on the basis of their live performances. But without much label interest in a professional recording of their shows, it is therefore not susrprising but fitting that the few that have been released officially are essentially bootleg quality, with one exception, which will be discussed eventually.

The first live release was both historic and contractual. The band kept busy during the New York Loaded sessions by playing a residency at Max’s Kansas City. While Maureen had to sit out due to her pregnancy, Doug Yule’s kid brother Billy played drums. One show was captured on a table-top cassette recorder by a friend of the band, and as chance would have it, it was also Lou’s last show before quitting. Hence, Live At Max’s Kansas City became something of an official farewell album, touching on all aspects of the band’s work, including such surprising inclusions as “Sunday Morning” and “After Hours”, punctuated by Lou’s wistful introductions and the sound of poet rocker Jim Carroll ordering drinks between songs. It’s more historic than definitive, since Doug Yule was under the impression he was in just another rock ‘n roll band instead of one of the more seminal entities in the pantheon. (Some 32 years later Rhino reissued an expanded edition of the album, including all of both sets from that night in their original sequence. Even Lou’s farewell songs are enhanced in this format.)

In response to Lou’s growing fame as a glam solo act, their original label decided to cash in on whatever they had left, compiling a two-record set from location tapes recorded at shows in Dallas and San Francisco. Taking care to highlight Lou’s name on the (hideous) cover art, at least the album known as 1969 could boast Maureen Tucker on drums. But what made it more interesting was the inclusion of several unreleased songs exclusive to the set. “Lisa Says” and “Ocean” had been heard by a select few on Lou’s first solo album, but here were full-fledged band versions, the former with a jaunty bridge and the latter stretched to ten fascinating minutes. “Over You” and the odd “Sweet Bonnie Brown/It’s Just Too Much” medley are curious on their own, but “We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together” crackles with energy. Many of the tracks are extended to jam length, and the key discovery to latecomers came in “New Age” and “Sweet Jane”, both in their original versions before being re-jigged for Loaded. (It was this version of “Sweet Jane” that the Cowboy Junkies covered in 1989, leading to their own success and an endorsement by a genuinely flattered Uncle Lou.)

When the 1969 album was reissued on CD, it was separated into two budget-priced volumes, with an extra track on each. A rehaul is long overdue, but there has been a sequel of sorts. Come the turn of the century, when the archival boom helped boost sales in a dying industry, the Velvet Underground became the latest act to find themselves with an authorized “Bootleg Series”. The inaugural—and to date, only—volume in the series was culled from various safeties of cassettes recorded by guitarist (and eventual Reed sidekick) Robert Quine with his own personal tape recorder at twelve different shows. The Quine Tapes offers three discs chock full of the Velvets playing their little hearts out, complete with Maureen singing both “After Hours” and “I’m Sticking With You”, and three renditions of “Sister Ray” ranging from 24 to 38 minutes. One key rarity is “Follow The Leader”, otherwise known only from a mid-‘70s Lou solo album. Despite the method and fidelity of the recordings, both 1969 and The Quine Tapes are quite enjoyable.

The Velvet Underground Live At Max’s Kansas City (1972)—3
2004 Deluxe Edition: same as 1972, plus 8 extra tracks
The Velvet Underground 1969: The Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed (1974)—4
1988 CD: same as 1974, plus 2 extra tracks
The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (2001)—3½

Joe Jackson 9: Live 1980/86

2011-07-27T07:26:00.003-04:00

Despite not being the most lucrative artist on their label, A&M was still willing to bankroll any ideas Joe had. Will Power was an original, strictly symphonic work, with the exception of the exquisite “Nocturne” piano instrumental. Much of the next year was dedicated to writing and recording the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s latest flop. Tucker was also predominantly instrumental, based around forties swing, alternating between mood music and upbeat fanfares like “Toast Of The Town”.
But in the middle came the surprising release of a double live album. What makes Live 1980/86 so entertaining is given in the title—a side each from four different tours covering six years on the road. Each of the bands is different in some way, but all are tight as can be.
The first side is dedicated to the final show by the original Joe Jackson band, beginning with a tentative “One To One” before introducing the band and revving it up. An amazing performance of “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” (one of three here) spirals up into an extended vamp on the opening chords that manages to morph into a blistering “Don’t Wanna Be Like That”.
Sides two and three, recorded little over a year apart, are acknowleged in the excellent liner notes as being similar, but even the more contemporary pop sounds he’d developed manage to transform songs like “On Your Radio” and “Fools In Love”. The version of “A Slow Song”, which closes side three, is absolutely overflowing with emotion—again, described in the liner notes—the sax solo nicely replacing the calmer organ of the album version. (The crowd reaction provides a nice contrast to the included photo of the audience at a 1982 gig opening up for the Who, taken from the viewpoint of the singer, looking out over a stadium floor full of raised middle fingers.)
Side four—the only one not to feature the stalwart Graham Maby on bass—was the most recent tour captured at the time, and it’s the best side. Several songs are reworked here: “Be My Number Two” merges very nicely into “Breaking Us In Two” with a subdued nylon-string solo; “It’s Different For Girls” is transformed into an acoustic strum; “You Can’t Get What You Want” loses the horns without the energy; “Jumpin’ Jive” gets a rockin’ workout that must have been memorized by Brian Setzer; and “Steppin’ Out” becomes an atmospheric meditation as filtered through side two of Big World.
With almost two hours of music, Live 1980/86 is riveting and hardly tedious. Yes, there are actually three different versions of “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” on this album, and while the so-called “acoustic” and “a cappella” renditions are enjoyable in their own ways, the best is still the tense burner from 1980. As it should, Joe’s prowess on the piano is slowly revealed through the four sides.

Joe Jackson Live 1980/86 (1988)—4

Hannah Cranna: Better Lonely Days

2011-07-25T06:53:00.002-04:00

For a few brief, shining years, the city of New Haven appeared to be on the verge of becoming the next Athens or Minneapolis in terms of a breeding ground for rock music. Its relative proximity to New York City as well as Boston made it a thriving scene for punk bands in the late ‘70s, which continued through the ‘80s with such bands as Miracle Legion and Those Melvins coming this close to capturing national attention.
As grunge became mainstream nationwide, some of the more cerebral musicians turned to power pop and alt.country for inspiration. That melodic equation is apparent all over Hannah Cranna’s Better Lonely Days. These songs, mostly of a romantic bent, are so crisp and catchy that you wonder why they hadn’t been written already. Strident rhythm guitars and tasteful leads drive most of the tracks, glued together by Beatlesque “ooh-la-la-la” harmonies.
The influences are fairly upfront—one song is even titled “Paul McCartney And Wings”, for crying out loud—but you’d be hard pressed to pinpoint any blatant steals. Nor will you notice that most of the songs are in G. Even with that, the sources are unexpected; “In The Sky” is adapted from an Emily Dickinson poem, while a modified arrangement of the Kinks classic “Waterloo Sunset” gives over a verse in favor of a thick solo.
The high point of the album is the stellar should’ve-been-a-smash “Hello”, which even gets away with a spoken interlude. Other standouts, like “Angeline”, “She Loves Me” and the title track, will also perk up weary ears.
They simply don’t make albums like Better Lonely Days anymore, and it would be awfully nice if someone did. As for the band itself, their self-titled follow-up sported some terrific songs and production by Badfinger’s Joey Molland, but unfortunately didn’t propel them much further than New Haven. After the turn of the century it seems they mutated into a variety of side projects, and the word on the street is that they’re recording again. If the new songs are anything like the ones on their debut, that would indeed be good news.

Hannah Cranna Better Lonely Days (1995)—4

Lou Reed 4: Rock ‘N Roll Animal

2011-07-22T07:07:00.002-04:00

By now Lou was getting a reputation as the epitome of decadence, and he milked it for all it was worth. Onstage he abandoned the guitar, choosing to concentrate on singing and indulging in performance art. We haven’t found an exact date, but halfway through 1973 he morphed from the curls and whiteface—soon to be immortalized, and probably not coincidentally, by Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show—in favor of a buzz cut, lipstick and studded leather.
This is the image associated with Rock ‘N Roll Animal, a live album culled from a Christmastime show in New York City. Here the primitive sound of the Velvet Underground is nearly transformed into arena rock, beginning with the overblown (but still wonderful) extended intro to “Sweet Jane”. Guitars, played by a couple of guys who’d soon join Alice Cooper, interwine over funky bass and keyboards before finally finding their way down to that immortal four-chord change as the singer walks on stage and the crowd goes nuts. A lengthy “Heroin” apes the dynamics of the original, but the guitar harmonies and fake Bach organ fugues have us wondering if the band bothered listening to the lyrics. “White Light/White Heat” delivers a nice, nasty crunch, with Steve Hunter doing his best Mick Ronson impression. “Lady Day” is fairly faithful to the album version, but the extra funky “Rock And Roll” takes the song a little too far from its inspiration.
In order to keep their boy on the charts, only six months after the commercially successful Sally Can’t Dance, his label issued another six songs from the show as Lou Reed Live. Three songs from Transformer are set against two from Berlin and “I’m Waiting For The Man”, and while it’s always nice to hear “Sad Song”, the album doesn’t quite have the fire of the first installment. When, at the turn of the century, Rock ‘N Roll Animal was reissued with two bonus tracks, it merely begged the still-unanswered question: why don’t they just repackage the entire show and put the whole thing out in sequence?

Lou Reed Rock ‘N Roll Animal (1974)—3½
2000 reissue: same as 1974, plus 2 extra tracks
Lou Reed Lou Reed Live (1975)—2½

Ben Folds 1: Ben Folds Five

2011-07-20T08:38:00.002-04:00

Ben Folds is a strangely divisive performer—it seems people either love or hate him. His particular brand of geek-rock can be grating to naysayers, but his supporters are positively devoted to his pop craftsmanship in the tradition of early Elton John and Billy Joel through Joe Jackson and even Todd Rundgren.
He first got notice as the leader of the Ben Folds Five, a trio consisting of simply piano, distorted bass and drums with vocals and killer harmonies. (The joke in the band name was enough to either pull in or repel the curious.) Those who delved into their eponymous debut found a stellar pop gem with more hooks than your grandfather’s tackle box.
“Jackson Cannery” leads the pounding charge through a few dynamic changes to show the band’s chops, taken to an even higher level on “Philosophy”. The headbanging “Julianne” is one of the funnier songs to namecheck Axl Rose, nicely punctuated by flying dishes. “Where’s Summer B?” and “Alice Childress” are vivid portraits of the people in your neighborhood, particularly if you’re a twentysomething. His trademark sarcasm and skewering of pop culture first rears its head on “Underground”, which predicted the emo scene by about five years. At the same time, hearing “Video” today only shows how much MTV has changed.
Further eccentric characters emerge on “Sports & Wine” and particularly “Uncle Walter”; surely everybody knows an old codger who holds forth from the comfort of his easy chair? The best song on the album is “Best Imitation Of Myself”, with its poetic lyric and fantastic arrangement, and its sentiment is taken to a nastier level on “The Last Polka”, a blistering look at the end of a relationship, soon to be another Ben Folds trademark. But the most surprising moment is saved for last. It’s not until the repeat of the chorus of “Boxing” that the song is revealed to be an imaginary conversation between a former pugilist and Howard Cosell, and with the simple statement “boxing’s been good to me, Howard”, it’s not difficult to think of the shell of Muhammed Ali.
Ben Folds Five was released on an offshoot of the “indie” Caroline label, and it got enough attention to leapfrog them to a major label. But they were already paying their dues on the road, whipping sparse audiences into laughter while throwing piano stools at the keys.

Ben Folds Five Ben Folds Five (1995)—4

R.E.M. 4: Fables Of The Reconstruction

2011-07-18T06:46:00.002-04:00

For their third album, the boys from Athens hooked up with legendary producer Joe Boyd (who’d worked with Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and the like) in London to record an album still infused with the mythology of the American South. The metallic jangle of the first two albums was a little blurred on Fables Of The Reconstruction, but in the process they managed to both satisfy their rabid fan base and grab a few new acolytes along the way.
A dissonant riff peals through throughout “Feeling Gravitys Pull”, which simmers with dread even after the strings come in. Also in a minor key, but providing the majestic feel common to the album is “Maps And Legends”, another one of those songs that’s just on the verge of meaning something. “Driver 8” was a moderate hit, with a jaunty video about trains to match. “Life And How To Live It” is as catchy as any song with buried vocals can be, while “Old Man Kensey” slows everything down for a tribute to a local oddball.
Even those who always hated R.E.M. can get behind the almost funky “Cant Get There From Here”, with words one can almost figure out, a catchy chorus and even a horn section that doesn’t get in the way. “Green Grow The Rushes” takes a folk melody to (supposedly) talk about Latin American foreign policy, and “Kohoutek” not only buries the lyric, but spells the title any number of ways. The claustrophobia returns on the tense “Auctioneer (Another Engine)”, which considers more trains. “Good Advices” provides a gentle respite (and good advice besides), and an ode to “Wendell Gee” brings it all home sweetly.
While the band was just on the edge to gaining mainstream success, Fables Of The Reconstruction managed to sound like nothing else that year, and increase the band’s mystique, to the point where it still remains a favorite. The 25th Anniversary Edition arrived right on time, and while it could have been repackaged similar to the previous Deluxe Editions, it was from a different label, and R.E.M. isn’t about to make things easy for anybody. Instead of a concert recording, here they treat us to some demos of the candidates for the album before they flew to London to record. The demos appear in alphabetical order, which is almost certainly not the order in which they were captured; if we’re wrong, we’d be delighted. Peter Buck’s (brief) liner notes talk about how unprepared they were for this, the difficult third album. He doth protest too much, but far be it from him to let the truth get in the way of a good story. What’s truly amazing about these demos is how much of the album is already in place—guitar parts and lyrics alike. Bill beats a tattoo on “Feeling Gravitys Pull”, which someone (probably Joe Boyd) pulled into check by the time the album proper was recorded. And we do get “Throw Those Trolls Away”, which likely turned into “When I Was Young”, listed on the album’s original inner sleeve, but didn’t appear until the next album as the much-improved “I Believe”.

R.E.M. Fables Of The Reconstruction (1985)—4½
2010 25th Anniversary Edition: same as 1985, plus 14 extra tracks

Joe Jackson 8: Body And Soul

2011-07-15T08:57:00.002-04:00

Staying in New York City for the nonce, Joe’s next move was to make an album that embraced digital technology while staying true to the more organic elements of the instruments. Simultaneously looking forwatd and back, Body And Soul was even packaged like an old Blue Note album, complete with vintage typography and heady liner notes (most likely penned by the Artist).
“The Verdict” crashes out of the speakers with a grand horn theme; while it’s only tangentially related to the film of the same name, there’s a grandeur of sorts that infuses the narrator. “Cha Cha Loco” rehashes the Latin experiments of the last album over a piano line that doesn’t do much, but a nice big ballad comes in “Not Here, Not Now”. Over a sad melody, the lyrics detail a crumbling relationship kept afloat by a desire to not to “make a scene” amongst friends—the narcissism of the ‘80s made clear. With the unwieldy title “You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)”, that song wasn’t the most likely candidate for a hit single, but once you get past the horns and enjoy the bridge, even the bass and guitar solos start to make sense. The optimism continues on “Go For It”, an oddly encouraging sentiment coming from his mouth. Or maybe he was being ironic?
His fascination with the metropolitan melting pot culminates on “Loisaida”, its title a phonetic translation of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It’s designed to be an impressionistic journey through the neighborhood, something of a cousin to “Harlem Nocturne”, and at that level it works, even if the sax part reminds us of “No Anchovies, Please” by the J. Geils Band. The liner notes helpfully point out the harmonic juxtapositions of “Happy Ending”; while the “Be My Baby” drum part is always welcome, the Night Court fan in us wishes backup singer Ellen Foley could have sung the female half of the duet. There’s time for another big ballad, the wondrous “Be My Number Two” that manages to sound romantic despite its undercurrent of selfishness. Predominantly voice and piano, it breaks through at the end by adding drums, violin and horns. Another tone poem of sorts, “Heart Of Ice”, is used to bookend the album. For the first part of it, it almost sounds like a Pat Metheny album, and that’s not meant as a slam.
Body And Soul was not a huge hit, but when heard back to back with Night And Day, it emerges as the superior album. The steps taken to provide optimal sound comes through on the vinyl, while the breadth of musical styles makes it excellent pop.

Joe Jackson Body And Soul (1984)—3½

Monkees 3: Headquarters

2011-07-13T05:35:00.002-04:00

Following a successful tour of England, where they got to hang out with the real Fab Four, the Monkees managed to stage a coup, ousting Don Kirshner as supervisor of their music. Now they were determined to make their next album on their own, choosing the songs themselves and playing all the instruments. While it had all the potential of a massive train wreck, Headquarters turned out great, giving them the respect they felt they’d more than earned.
They didn’t just try to expand their screen presence, either. While Micky proved to be a competent drummer, Mike expanded his expertise to learning pedal steel guitar. And Peter relinquished the bass duties to producer Chip Douglas, adding a variety of tasteful keyboards throughout. (Davy, of course, played the hell of out his maracas.)
With a jokey count-in, “You Told Me” gallops in, complete with banjo, setting up what would soon be called country rock, continued on “I’ll Spend My Life With You” (a Tommy Boyce-Bobby Hart song, and an excellent choice). Their producer offered up “Forget That Girl”, Davy’s first vocal on the LP and a nice one. “Band 6” was probably not the best choice of a track to show off their instrumental prowess, but if you listen closely you can just hear Nesmith find his way through the Looney Toons theme. Another song first heard on the TV show, “You Just May Be The One”, is here given a better vocal and tighter all-around performance. “Shades Of Gray” is something of a serious song, splitting the vocal between Davy, Micky and even Peter. And Davy does a tapdance routine on the still charming “I Can’t Get Her Off My Mind”.
Peter was definitely on a roll here, as “For Pete’s Sake” predicted the spirit of the Summer of Love, and was even tapped to be the closing theme of the TV show. Another Boyce-Hart song, the eerie “Mr. Webster”, takes a page from the Kinks, complete with surprise ending. Mike’s last and best contribution to the album proper is “Sunny Girlfriend”, so simple yet so catchy. As with side one, the middle position is taken by a novelty, in this case the superior round “Zilch”. The band gets to rock (and Micky gets to scat) on “No Time”, before the chilly suburban vibe of “Early Morning Blues And Greens”, a surprisingly cynical Davy vocal over Peter’s layered keyboards. Micky’s tympani drives “Randy Scouse Git”, a response to their British tour, as infectious as it is inscrutable.
In the tradition of the Beatles, no singles were released from the album, but those who bought the 45 of “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” might have flipped it to experience “The Girl I Knew Somewhere”, their greatest song and performance. When Rhino released their expanded CD, however, an earlier take was included, along with other full band performances of lesser musical quality. The later Deluxe Edition did include the single, but unfortunately gives too much attention to the pile of dreck that Davy, ever the company man, added vocals to in the last days before the Kirshner era ended.
These are most likely of interest only to the collectors who’d rued their exclusion from Headquarters Sessions, a bold step taken by Rhino’s Handmade division, which specialized in limited editions of albums that even Rhino geeks would consider extreme. Following in the pattern of the similar treatment of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds box, these three CDs follow the album’s (and the band’s) progression as the tracks developed from first takes to final mixes, with lots of time given to session outtakes and backing tracks, to demonstrate how well these guys managed to play together.

The Monkees Headquarters (1967)—4
1995 reissue CD: same as 1967, plus 6 extra tracks
2007 Deluxe Edition: same as 1994, plus 30 extra tracks

Lou Reed 3: Berlin

2011-07-11T10:23:00.004-04:00

It’s trendy among rock snobs to champion Berlin as a masterpiece, and while we’re not about to go that far, we will attempt to defend it somewhat. Granted, we probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to the album if it weren’t for a certain anthology of the work of Lester Bangs, but even he wasn’t infallible.
Berlin is a vague song cycle about a doomed relationship in the then-divided city, marred by violence and drug addiction, pieced together from a variety of disparate songs, some of which had been germinating since the Velvet Underground days. Featuring an all-star cast and a grandiose Bob Ezrin production, it’s the source of Lou’s stereotypical laconic image, the barbituate downside to his established amphetamine rush.
Beginning with a wobbly recording of a birthday party, the title track takes only a few elements of the original, sticking to the basic theme played on a cocktail piano. Suddenly “Lady Day” crashes in, with Steve Winwood’s nightmarish organ underpinning the unspoken dread in the lyrics. Likewise, “Men Of Good Fortune” is pinned by Jack Bruce’s overpowering bass. “Caroline Says I” is almost upbeat, complete with a closing string arrangement right off of any number of chamber-pop records, shifting abruptly into the swaggering “How Do You Think It Feels”. “Oh Jim”, grafted from two VU outtakes, provides a little more plot before descending into a basic doo-wop tune without the harmonies.
Side two is where things get really interesting, and it’s worth pointing out that the man known for his “metal machine music” exclusively plays acoustic guitar on this album. “Caroline Says II” is another VU outtake, taken heartbreakingly slow in its depiction of the fall of the relationship. The most notorious track remains “The Kids”, which begins like an Irish reel, but is given over to a long vamp punctuated by the actual sounds of children crying for their mother. It’s not easy to say that “The Bed” provides any respite with its deceptive gentleness. A chorus of disembodied voices ushers in the grandiose “Sad Song”, transformed from a so-so Loaded outtake into a biting dismissal of the leading lady, thanks to one of Lou’s greatest couplets (“I’m gonna stop wasting my time/Somebody else would have broken both of her arms”) and summed up by the matter-of-fact repetition of the song’s title.
Berlin is a truly depressing album, and therefore not for everyone. Legend has it that the album, already bursting the grooves at 49 minutes, was originally over an hour long, and various sections had to be edited so it would fit on two sides of vinyl without losing sound quality. However, neither of the album’s two reissues in the CD era has restored any of this lost music. Even 33 years later, when the album was performed in its entirety onstage for the first time (as subsequently heard on CD and seen on film and DVD) the arrangements stuck to the album as memorized by the faithful. It remains a powerful work of art, and nobody said every work of art had to be pretty.

Lou Reed Berlin (1973)—4

Peter Gabriel 10: Secret World Live

2011-07-08T10:04:00.001-04:00

Having taken his latest album around the world for a typically elaborate tour, Peter recorded its live souvenir in Italy and issued as both an audio and a video release. While Secret World Live might best be enjoyed on a screen, where the songs are enhanced by the silly choreography of David Rhodes and Tony Levin, the album itself provides a nice overview of his most commercially successful era.
Thanks to technology, the band was able to replicate the sound of the records pretty well, but luckily they took several opportunities to stretch. “Steam” takes some time to catch fire, beginning in the more tense arrangement that the faithful would have enjoyed as the B-side “Quiet Steam”. There’s a nice interlude in the middle of the first half that travels from the even rarer “Across The River”, through “Slow Marimbas” (from Birdy!) and into a great jam on “Shaking The Tree”. We never get tired of “Solsbury Hill”, and this version is nice too. “Red Rain” and “Secret World” gain even more power in the live setting, the latter complete with a repeat of the coda. And the average consumer can finally own an extended “In Your Eyes”, stretched to over eleven minutes that never drag. Throughout, then-unknown Paula Cole, yet to wonder where all the cowboys had gone, sings all the requisite female parts and harmonies. Youssou N’Dour must not have been available, so a variety of singers attempt to replicate his wail.
While some writers have equated Secret World Live with “listening to a light show”—likely forgetting that such an insult can only be applied to half-assed Pink Floyd reviews—there’s a charm in the album that will appeal to fans. And who knows—maybe casual fans will enjoy it too.

Peter Gabriel Secret World Live (1994)—4

Joe Jackson 7: Night And Day

2011-07-06T09:35:00.002-04:00

A move to New York City invigorated Joe, and he recorded his next album of original material with a small group of players, not one of whom added a guitar to the recordings. On vinyl, Night And Day had two sides—“night” and “day”, naturally—but the designations didn’t necessarily apply to the music within, which could have easily taken place anywhere within a 24-hour cycle in the Big Apple.
From the beginning, he embraces the diverse ethnic culture of the city, with the Latin touches and percussion on “Another World”, followed by a search for “Chinatown”. There are no silences between the songs on this side; each fades into one another, just like the radio. But at least it’s not as abrupt as changing television channels, which would make “T.V. Age” even more irritating. “Target” wanders over the same Latin piano line for too long, but the side is redeemed by the hit single “Steppin’ Out”. Still catchy as ever, it was several years before we realized it, remarkably, has the same bass line throughout, except for the verses.
Ever a student of pop music history, “Breaking Us In Two” begins identically to Badfinger’s “Day After Day”, but he uses it to base a wonderful lovers’ lament. “Cancer” might be the best of the songs on the album with a Latin theme lambasting modern society; while that’s not saying much, at least the piano solo is more exploratory.
The success of the album was such that the label even bankrolled a video for “Real Men”, which got lots of MTV airplay despite its easily misunderstood lyrics about machismo, racism, homosexuality and other stereotypes. It’s still a gorgeously sad song, an idea he expands on for the epic “A Slow Song”. This masterwork may well be his theme song, a plea to cut through the disposable trends so that “real” music can transform our lives.
With its pop sound and attitude, exemplified by the cartoon on the front cover, Night And Day wasn’t about to please anyone who missed the edgy punk of his debut. But he was determined to be a working musician and composer, and enough people bought the album to keep his publisher happy. (It still cracks us up that drummer Larry Tolfree has the same look on his face as he did on Jumpin’ Jive. But at least Graham Maby lost the beard.)
While hasn’t matched its success since, the album has remained popular since its release. While the 2003 Deluxe Edition seemed promising—at the very least, to show that his old label still thought highly enough of him to bother—fans had to balance the allure of six demos with five vocal tracks from the little-heard soundtrack to Mike’s Murder and the entirety of side two of Live 1980/86. While context is all good and well, this took the idea of recycling a tad far.

Joe Jackson Night And Day (1982)—3
2003 Deluxe Edition: same as 1982, plus 16 extra tracks

Joni Mitchell 8: The Hissing Of Summer Lawns

2011-07-04T07:50:00.002-04:00

She was enjoying her greatest commercial success to date, but for many consumers, this is where Joni seemed to go off the rails. With 35 years of hindsight, it seems the only beef people can have with The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is the use of synthesizers, which admittedly, stick out like two sore thumbs. Except for that, it’s a clear progression from the contemporary jazz she’d gotten such accolades for on Court And Spark, right down to yet another Annie Ross cover.
Something else to consider, as acknowledged in the liner notes, is that her words had become more poetic than lyrical, sometimes completely ignoring rhyme schemes for a pattern, like her guitar tunings, that make sense to only her. That’s not to say she stopped writing catchy songs. “In France They Kiss On Main Street” kicks it off with a straight jazz-rock backing and a few old boyfriends singing backup. “The Jungle Line” likely turned a lot of people off, driven by pounding African drums and dominated by a Moog synthesizer. (At the time such an instrument was still groundbreaking; these days it brings to mind the occasional video game.) More conventional sounds return for “Edith And The Kingpin”, an enigmatic film noir that gives a hint of her developing sound. “Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow” seems more abstract until you realize that it actually rhymes. A portrait of a Southern post-feminist is painted by piano and strings on “Shades Of Scarlet Conquering”.
Similarly, the title song was viewed by some as an indictment of a woman choosing to be symbolically imprisoned by an affluent husband, but as we’ve learned about suburbia, there seems to be a lot more going on than we can see. Another side of this theme is “The Boho Dance”, a somewhat guarded look (back) at compromises people make for their success. What sounds like a passing car horn ushers in “Harry’s House”, which juxtaposes the increasingly separate activities of a married couple with a memory illustrated by “Centerpiece”, a jazz standard shoehorned into the middle of the arrangement. “Sweet Bird” returns to the sound of For The Roses with slowly strummed yet slightly jittery guitars colored by piano. “Shadows And Light” is a daring closer, sung by layered voices and accompanied by a primitive string synthesizer.
The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is a little challenging, so while the public may not have been quick to embrace it, it does get namechecked by some of music’s snobbier figures, like Prince and Elvis Costello. Maybe the cover art didn’t help; the gatefold shows a bikini-clad Joni floating in a swimming pool, which may not be the same one tucked behind the mansion on the back cover, several hills and a continent away from the bungalows and skyscrapers on the front, while dark figures help a snake through the grass.

Joni Mitchell The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975)—3

Monkees 2: More Of The Monkees

2011-07-01T06:55:00.002-04:00

No matter what the actors themselves may have believed, the Monkees were a product first and foremost, and any responsible music organization in the mid-‘60s knew how essential it was to keep fresh merchandise on the shelves. So it was that, four months after the debut’s release and with half of a TV season still to be broadcast, More Of The Monkees was unleashed, to be undoubtedly snatched up by rabid teenyboppers.
Just as rabid, but for a different reason, was the band itself, who allegedly only heard of the album’s existence when they saw it advertised for sale. They hated the cover, and they especially hated the liner notes that gave all credit to the people behind the scenes, rather than the four boys being chased from hotel to stage to limo.
Their anger is a little misplaced, since it wasn’t like they hadn’t spent any time in the studio recording vocals for (and in Mike Nesmith’s case, writing and producing) a few albums’s worth of songs. A handful stretched back to the earliest sessions, while some were more recent, in search of their next hit single.
Still, despite the inclusion of some of those hits and TV favorites, there’s a distinct leftover feeling throughout the album. Peter finally gets to “sing” on “Your Auntie Grizelda”, but the absolute nadir is Davy’s wretched spoken performance on “The Day We Fall In Love”. (He pulled the same trick on the bridge of “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)”, so obviously some genius thought it was a good idea.)
The inclusion of such head-scratchers makes it hard to fathom this is the same album that gave us “I’m A Believer” and “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone”. “Mary, Mary” had already been recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, but one hidden highlight is “Sometime In The Morning”, a Goffin-King nugget delivered nicely by Micky.
More Of The Monkees hasn’t aged well as the first album, with its reliance on fuzztone guitars and harpsichords. But it didn’t have to be good, it just had to sell, which it did, by the bucketful. (Again, Rhino’s first CD was only slightly expanded, while the Deluxe Edition is loaded with timely outtakes, TV hits and alternate versions.)

The Monkees More Of The Monkees (1967)—3
1994 reissue CD: same as 1967, plus 5 extra tracks
2006 Deluxe Edition: same as 1994, plus 25 extra tracks

Peter Gabriel 9: Us

2011-06-29T10:14:00.003-04:00

While fans were accustomed to Peter Gabriel’s slow release pace and interest in world music, they were clamoring for the true follow-up to So. With Us, chock full of songs built on hooks, they got it.
He’d written about relationships before, of course, but what made this album so different was that each of the songs (well, nine of them, anyway) overtly dealt with topics like communication, desire and sex. He was in a crossroads; having finally divorced from his wife, he had also found himself in the tabloids when he was seen in the company of the fetching Rosanna Arquette.
The opening fanfare of “Come Talk To Me” sounds like bagpipes, with galloping drums accompanying a plea, a demand for attention, it’s hard to ignore him. Things turn down though, first for the straightforward “Love To Be Loved”, then for “Blood Of Eden”, which musically sounds akin to “Don’t Give Up”, only this time the voice of hope is provided by Sinead O’Connor. The horn-heavy “Sledgehammer” sound returns on “Steam”, and while it’s not explicitly about the physical act, there’s a horniness to it. “Only Us” uses a variety of conflicting meters to disguise the song’s true rhythm, but it doesn’t really settle in.
“Washing Of The Water” is lyrically and musically reminiscent of spirituals, and its feel certainly conveys the desire to be cleansed, to start anew. (Indeed, some of sounds influenced by “Bread And Wine”, the closing track on Passion.) The mood is truly jarred by “Digging In The Dirt”. Here the emotions touched on via therapy are exposed to the raw, culminating in the sinister “don’t talk back” sections before the choruses. “Fourteen Black Paintings” begins as another throwback to the Passion album, with its tense ambience and use of Mideastern instruments, but its simple lyrics rather recall “We Do What We’re Told”. But to revive the attention of anyone who left the room to get popcorn, “Kiss That Frog” provides an uptempo come-on, with all the hallmarks of vintage soul, and little subtlety in the lyrics. But he saves the best for last. “Secret World” gears up steadily on an almost machine-like beat, and brings in a vocal that’s tired, resigned yet proud of the state of his relationship. It’s not clear whether the people in the song are going to stay together or separate, but that’s what makes it universal. Chills arrive at the whispered “shh—listen” near the end.
Us is a heavier listen than So, but the overall strength endures and reveals itself over time, just as the composer revealed himself in the songs. While Daniel Lanois (again) helped bring Peter’s ideas into the ‘90s, older fans likely enjoyed the touches that reminded them of the Peter Gabriel of a decade before.

Peter Gabriel Us (1992)—3½

U2 16: No Line On The Horizon

2011-06-27T08:55:00.003-04:00

Outside of two new songs on 2006’s U218 Singles compilation—one of which a collaboration with Green Day; neither of which were very exciting—it was another five-year wait to the next U2 album. In the meantime there was the usual talk about how they’d finally got their old sound back. That wasn’t immediately apparent on No Line On The Horizon but there were enough echoes of their early albums to make it sound like, well, U2.
The title track explodes with a heavy beat and Mideastern touches, under Bono’s yell. “Magnificent” manages to cross the classic sound with the Achtung Baby era for a decent single. Despite all the accolades for its “universal” lyrical content, “Moment Of Surrender” simply takes too long to achieve the chorus. Much more effective, and working on the same theme, “Unknown Caller” nicely works in response vocals like the better parts of Zooropa; the extremely familiar Edge guitar sound helps too. “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” is a dumb pop song, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it sounds like it was written specifically for arena concerts.
By the same token, the lead single, “Get On Your Boots”, fills the same role as “Vertigo” did on the previous album, a catchy stomper designed to grab. They get almost funky on “Stand Up Comedy”, but complicate it with several changes that reduce it to not much. We get just a hint of experimentation on the moody intro of “Fez—Being Born”; the main part of the song succeeds by concentrating less on lyrics and more on sound. “White As Snow” takes its melody from a Christmas carol for an effective meditation on a soldier’s death. The mood is jarred by the hip rap speak in “Breathe”, before going quiet yet again on “Cedars Of Lebanon”, another reflection on war.
U2 came in like a lion and out like a lamb on No Line On The Horizon, making for a slightly underwhelming listen. For the first time, each of the tracks gave writing credits to Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois instead of simple production; Steve Lillywhite is on hand for a few songs as well. They also insisted that they had another album’s worth of material they’d be putting out almost immediately; two years later, we’re still waiting. Meanwhile, the band tours and tours, and we wonder how long they can keep going.

U2 No Line On The Horizon (2009)—3

Lou Reed 2: Transformer

2011-06-24T08:00:00.002-04:00

Although his first solo album didn’t sell, Lou had support within the business, not least from his disciple David Bowie, who took it upon himself to produce his next album, with additional help on both sides of the glass from Mick Ronson. The combination immediately made Transformer better than its predecessor.
Right away “Vicious” applies another “Sweet Jane” variation to a provocative lyric suggested by Andy Warhol, who’s also the inspiration behind the highly ambiguous “Andy’s Chest”. One song that’s managed to become a standard of sorts is “Perfect Day”, though chances are the people who’ve come to love it and its covers haven’t considered that this is not your ordinary romantic walk in the park. “Hangin’ ‘Round” brings back the New York rock of the first album with a rewrite of “Wild Child”. Some of those streets are better celebrated in “Walk On The Wild Side”, the classic unlikely hit single with enough innuendo to excite generations of suburban punks.
The low-key “Make Up” begins with a detailed description of a “slick little girl” doing up her face, then slides into suggestions of transvestism, punctuated by a tuba, of all things. “Satellite Of Love” doesn’t have many lyrics, but they appear to be about a guy who likes to watch telelvision while ruminating on somebody’s alleged promiscuity. Mick Ronson’s stately piano works well to counter Bowie’s backing vocals. Another slice of the streets comes in “Wagon Wheel”, which mostly rocks except for an odd midsection that brings everything to complete standstill. “New York Telelphone Conversation” is basically an interlude, delivered in his thickest, sharpest Long Island accent. Some welcome rock returns in “I’m So Free”, before the tuba returns on “Goodnight Ladies”, another trip to the cabaret. (Of course, he’d already written its prototype as “Afterhours”, and while this one talks more about TV dinners than late night bars, it didn’t stop him from using the same changes for the bridge.)
Four decades on, Transformer is more notorious than excellent, but it was a hit, and with its success, Lou Reed became the new poster boy for decadence. It would prove to be something of a burden, but in the meantime, at least he could draw an audience for his songs.

Lou Reed Transformer (1972)—3
2002 30th Anniversary Edition: same as 1972, plus 3 extra tracks