This album, Loudon's 1970 debut release, is most similar to Album II due to the sparse instrumentation and melancholy tone. He's young, self-absorbed, and full of emotion and a histrionic whine. That aside, this album, and his early material in general, runs circles around just about any contemporary singer-songwriter. While his humor isn't as prominent on this album as it is later on, it still exists on songs like "Uptown", a song about living in squalor in lower Manhattan. For the most part, though, the songs are brutally honest and poignant, a characteristic that Loudo sharpened in subsequent releases. "School Days" and "Glad to See You've Got Religion" are stand-outs in that department.
After listening to handfuls of his other albums, this is a bit of an anachronism. It's got all the qualities that Loudon's come to be known for, though the songwriting just isn't quite as sharp yet. But that youthful forcefulness, the freshness in his voice, the obvious desire to be recognized- these are the things that make this album worth it.
I've just returned from a solid 2 1/2 week visit to some of the more remote areas of New South Wales and Tasmania. What a country.
Much of the time was spent driving through the country (I drove some 2000 kms) with my family, listening to family-friendly music. One such album was Paul McCartney's "Band on the Run".
This album is a classic (of course) and one of Macca's finest. It's an album of masterful composition. Though short on lyrical depth, it's nearly perfect otherwise. Nobody expects Paul to be a poet anyway.
In 1999, a 2-disc release was issued. The second disc is basically Macca talking about the songwriting process and a bunch of 80's sound check versions of the more popular songs from the album (which are, in a word, terrible). But it's worth listening to the dialogue for his American and Cockney accents and the general ego involved. I guess it also helps if you're as obsessive about this album as I am.
The last week or two I've been waking up with really strange songs in my head. Just the other day I was looking for this ELO song that popped into my head one morning (I almost wrote pooped into my head, isn't that FUNNY?). Songs seem to be coming up out of nowhere lately, dusting themselves off from the archival abyss in the annals of my brain, and taking center stage in my consciousness. It's not by choice, at all. Two days ago it was Goo Goo Dolls' "Slide", I shit you not. There's some messed up wiring going on in my upstairs, you know what I'm saying?
So I was looking for this song, and I wasn't really sure what it was called, but figured I had it on my computer. So I searched through all 9 GDing ELO albums on my computer, only to come up empty. But about a year ago, before I got a turntable in my possession, I bought the ELO album "Discovery" from a dollar bin somewhere. Discovery came out a couple years after their back-to-back masterpieces, but right before their disco cheeseball phase. At this point they were only borderline disco cheeseball. Anyway, voila! Song's called "Shine a Little Love".
As it's the first song on this particular record, it opens with the obligatory space-time warping synth sounds, before quickly shifting into a huge hook, laden with hand claps and searing violin work. Discovery is kind of a hit and miss record, but it's worth that crate dig and 100 cents for the few noteworthy tracks on the record.
Here's the sweet, sweet video for the song.
Check out those glittering vests! See what I'm saying about borderline disco cheeseball?
Cocaine is a funny drug when it comes to music. It makes some artists actually create better music (Sly and the Family Stone), and it gives some artists the illusion that their music is better than it really is (Conor Oberst). Some artists, after kicking the habit, get bloated (John Mayer), and some die a cocaine death (Ike Turner). A lot of musicians have written songs about the pitfalls of cocaine (Phish, Bob Dylan). But it takes something special to write a song championing the love for such a notorious substance.
Enter: Little Feat (and possibly Van Dyke Parks). Little Feat were a Southern rock band in the 70's. The first time I had ever heard of them, it was on the recommendation of my dad.
One day a few years ago he mentioned this Little Feat to me. "Oh yeah, they were smokin'!" or something. "Ok cool, I'll have to...check them out...someday..." and then I didn't.
It wasn't until I saved a copy of Robert Palmer's Sneaking Sally Through the Alley from becoming dumpster food that I first got to know what Little Feat were all about. The backing band on this album are a couple dudes from Little Feat and a couple dudes from the Meters, and the first track is a cover of Little Feat's "Sailing Shoes". The cover is pretty funked out, with a heavy bass line and some sultry ladies complementing Palmer's soulful pipes. And then I still didn't seek out the original until I was at my parents' house last September. I was digging through some of my records, some of which got mixed in with my parents'. And there it was: 1972's Sailing Shoes, by Little Feat.
I was watching the Cubs trying to clinch the division with the sound off, and popped the old bird onto the platter. The original "Sailin' Shoes" is much more sparse than the Palmer cover. It's Southern, but not in that dumb rock Skynyrd kind of way. It doesn't try to rock at all. Laid-back slide guitar, plodding honky tonk piano, gospel chorus. In a word, this song owns.
I had my computer music on shuffle this week, and what should pop up but a Van Dyke Parks song entitled "Sailin' Shoes" from the same year as the Little Feat version. "What is this all about?" I asked myself.
Well it turns out, Parks probably had something to do with the writing of this song. He and Little Feat's frontman (and member of Zappa's Mothers of Invention) Lowell George were good friends. It seems a little odd, then, that Parks never got credit for the song.
Booker T and the MG's, most known as the Stax house band that brought the world Green Onions, were no stranger to cover songs. In 1970 they managed an entire album dedicated to covers of songs from the Beatles' Abbey Road. McLemore Avenue, named after the avenue that housed Stax studios, contains all but four of the original album's tracks (leaving out Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Oh Darling, Octopus' Garden, and Paul McCartney's closing ditty Her Majesty). Similarly to Abbey Road's second side, most of the songs here are arranged as medleys, which gives the album a lot of fluidity. What's interesting, though, is that the songs are not entirely replicated in their original sequence. "The End" fuses into "Here Comes the Sun" and "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" turns into "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". It's quite a curveball for anyone that's listened to Abbey Road enough to know all the lyrics by heart (as millions of people surely do).
Although McLemore Avenue doesn't offer the variety or studio professionalism that Abbey Road does, it's a lot more groove-driven. The signature Booker T elements are there, including the constant organ whir, loose guitar solos, and tight rhythm section of Donald "Duck" "Double Chin" Dunn and Al Jackson Jr. Sure, McLemore Avenue is a bit of a novelty. But it's more fun and laid-back than the original and it's something new, yet familiar (like Coke Zero or any romantic comedy ever made).
I wish writing about principles of good governance was as fun as this album...
I really don't know much about Henry Cow. Unrest is the only album I've heard by them. But it's a masterpiece of an album, and even if the rest of their stuff is garbage (which it likely isn't), they deserve to be praised based on Unrest alone.
I do know two things about Henry Cow: they were contemporaries of the Soft Machine and they were a band, not just some guy named Henry. The album Unrest sounds a bit like Third-era Soft Machine (post-singing) but with more free-jazz overtones. There are basically two types of songs in this album- those that are dominated by frenetic drumming and wailing, scatterbrained guitar solos ("Bitter Storm Over Ulm," "Half Asleep; Half Awake," "Upon Entering the Hotel Adlon"), and those that take direction via the bassoon ("Solemn Music," "Linguaphonie," "Arcades"). "Deluge" combines elements of both song structures with the drums taking the forefront and atonal, Albert Ayler-esque bassoon passages in the background. From here, the album goes into dark, tortured territory. "The Glove" sounds like a full-moon midnight at an electro-shock therapy clinic, replete with caterwauling, unsettling bassoon, and snippets of agitated drumming harnessed to what sounds like a chimp playing piano. "Torchfire" is only slightly less unnerving, as it avoids the pained yelling in favor of schizophrenic guitar and keyboard solos.
Another old video. This time it's the s/t song from the album "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac. The video is largely based around the making of the actual song with the USC Marching Band, which was no small (or cheap) feat. It includes a little morning wine, baton-twirling, and a cardboard cutout of John McVie. (Don't you love how wikipedia has horrible pictures of musicians well past their prime?)
The finest point in the evolution of music videos was early on when the short features shifted from a mock-live setting to something more directorially creative. Today we see music videos taken into a whole new faction of media, whereby videos tell a completely different story than the song itself or serve as a platform for showing off graphic design skills. The early 80's were a simpler time in the production of music videos, when the video served to enhance the meaning of the song through simple narratives.
Many bands that I cherish had fallen by the qualitative wayside by the time videos were becoming an artform. Not Thin Lizzy, though. They managed to put out some gems in that time period. It's hard for me to say what my favorite Thin Lizzy album is, but 1979's Black Rose probably gets the most spins.
The song "Sarah" was released as the third single off the album and is probably the poppiest hit Thin Lizzy ever put out. The song was written for Phil Lynott's daughter, and the video shows Sarah growing up before his very eyes and into a woman, then a Scott Gorham.
They're a staple on the classic rock stations, an institution of "southern rock." They have a hatful of hits, ranging from blues covers to party songs to rueful traveling jams. Creedence Clearwater Revival are an especially impressive band when you consider that they made seven albums in just over five years, all of which are good.
The critic's pick is usually Cosmo's Factory, which contains six singles, a cover of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and quite possibly their best song ever, "Ramble Tamble." Willy & The Poor Boys is another critical winner and fan favorite, and it's no wonder with their two biggest hits, "Fortunate Son" and "Down on the Corner."
But the only album that is generally disregarded is far and away my favorite in the CCR catalogue. 1972's Mardi Gras. This album only contains one song (the underrated "Someday Never Comes") featured on that ubiquitous "Chronicle Vol 1" album. As a youngster, Chronicle was my introduction to CCR, as it probably was for most anybody that's ever liked the band. But when I finally got around the listening to Mardi Gras, possibly the reason I liked it so much was because it didn't feature those Chronicle songs. These are the deep cuts.
What's more interesting is that this is the only CCR album that doesn't feature Fogerty Tom, and still the only one to feature songwriting contributions from the other members of the band. I don't know if John's tank was running dry or if the departure of Tom left him to reflect on his controlling ways, but I'm personally glad Doug Clifford and Stu Cook got their moment in the sun. And what's more, Clifford never sulled his nickname "Cosmo" with racist banter (see: Michael Richards). With all that variety, and without any singles (but one), nobody can differentiate between what's good and what's filler. It's brilliant!
Where Creedence were always teetering on the line between country and swamp rock boogie, they plummet into the country depths here. "Lookin' For A Reason" and "Tearin' Up the Country" are pure country- the former as an ambling stroll, the latter as a Johnny Cash homage. "What Are You Gonna Do" and "Hello Mary Lou" are two of the most straight-forward pop songs here, as punchy as they are simple.
The real shining moments, in my opinion, are single contributions from each member. Doug Clifford's "Need Someone to Hold' is the closest the album comes to balladry, and Clifford's the guy to do it, having a (relatively) smoother voice than the other two. "Someday Never Comes" is, as I said, underrated. If another song on this album contains a hint of balladry, it's this one, though it quickly shifts into driving rock, and just as quickly back to a slow-tempoed lament. Lyrically it's one of Fogerty's best, addressing the grandeur and egregiousness of youth. It's also the only song that clocks in at over 4 minutes. And then there's Stu Cook's "Sail Away." His voice, in contrast to Clifford's, is rougher than Fogerty's, and his delivery is totally overblown. It's an abrasive country pop number about shirking adult duties by taking to the sea. It's an appropriate song for his voice.
There is actually another single on this album that I've totally forgotten about until now. The Fogerty-penned "Sweet Hitchhiker" is the last track on the album, and basically sounds like every other barn-burning CCR song ever. I think it's maybe the most unexceptional song on the album, though it managed to get to #6 on the singles chart in its day. Forget about that song for the moment and enjoy the revamped stylings of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
The worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band" - Rolling Stone
1) Lookin' For a Reason 2) Take It Like a Friend 3) Need Somebody to Hold 4) Tearin' Up the Country 5) Someday Never Comes 6) What Are You Gonna Do 7) Sail Away 8) Hello Mary Lou 9) Door to Door 10) Sweet Hitch-hiker
And here's a little something from the Japanese CCR cover band, Clearance Creamsoda Redial...what'd he say?
I will forever assert that Hall & Oates are more than just a punchline or the musical equivalent to Siegfried & Roy(There is some creepy resemblance though). Granted, both Hall and Roy have been the victims of animal attacks. The difference is that Hall overcame Lyme Disease (which, interestingly enough, was first diagnosed by ex-girlfriend/songwriting partner Sara "Smile" Allen, who once had a bout with Lyme Disease herself) while Roy can hardly walk and part of his skull is now housed in his stomach. True story!
Like I said, Hall & Oates are more than a punchline. I will always stand up for their abilities. But, they are still a punchline. In the words of Neil Hamburger:
Why did the farmer start a punk rock band?
He was tired of Hall N' Oates!
If that's not enough punchline for you, check out Daryl Hall's appearance in this B-Legit video:
Since we here in Sydney haven't seen the sun in 8 days and it looks like a slip and slide outside, I thought I'd offer up "Lady Rain" from 1973's Abandoned Luncheonette. A lot of people say that Hall & Oates are nothing more than a singles band, but this is a great album from start to finish.
I wanted to write about Harry Nilsson because 1) Nilsson is one of my favorite songwriters ever 2) I was a little rushed to get up today and started singing "Gotta Get Up" for a few seconds before Emily joined in.
Much like most of today's songwriters, Nilsson never took himself too seriously and didn't stick to one or two styles of song. Rock songs? Check. Ballads? Check. Easy listening? Check. Children's songs? Check. Country? Check. Free-form jazz? Uh, ok, wouldn't go that far. Still, where his contemporaries (The Beatles, Cat Stevens, The Turtles [I guess he liked being contemporaries with animals]) only stuck to one or two of these styles, Nilsson managed to convincingly write and record in a myriad of genres, held together by his commanding presence as a singer. Only Randy Newman could be considered a rival, and nobody can stand that guy's voice for an entire album anyway.
Nilsson is known primarily for two movie songs- Midnight Cowboy's "Everybody's Talkin'" (later featured in Forrest Gump) and Nilsson Schmilsson's "Coconut," later featured in Reservoir Dogs. These songs highlight just part of the genius of Nilsson. He could do an airy, world-weary folk song (granted, he didn't write "Everybody's Talkin," but "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City" serves the same purpose) just as easily as a slow, percussion-heavy calypso song about hangovers.
Some of the greatest things about Nilsson aren't his songwriting, but his modesty and humor when handling his own talent. When Nilsson was recording with John Lennon for the Pussy Cats album, he ruptured a vocal cord and famously continued working because he didn't want Lennon to stop the sessions. As a youngster in 1960, Nilsson recorded a few tracks for $5 a piece. When he later became famous, the owner of the songs followed up with Nilsson as to offer proper compensation, Nilsson said he'd already been paid for the songs in 1960. Through 1968, he handled his own phones and often gave on-the-spot interviews.
Don't get me wrong. Nilsson did his fair share of partying and trouble-making. But at least he didn't go around smackinguphisladyfriend.
I want to share a few tracks that I especially enjoy, but I strongly urge you to dole out the $2.99 for most of his records.
I threw this record on last night as I was cooking spaghetti. Much like spaghetti, this record is a delicious mess. It was apparently recorded in 1971 with a couple members from Vangelis' earlier band, Aphrodite's Child, but didn't see release until 1978 on Charly Records, unbeknownst to Vangelis. He successfully sued the label and got the record pulled from stores. I don't know if it was ever released lawfully again or reissued on CD, but it's absolutely worth checking out. This isn't the uplifting Chariots of Fire Vangelis or the new age stylings of Jon & Vangelis. In short, this is not your mother's Vangelis.
The real winner on this album is the first track. Side-long "The Dragon" is a psych burn-out, complete with squalling guitars and electric violin. That dragon on the cover does a good job of portraying the impending apocalypse that is this song. The other two tracks are decent in their own right, but it's hard to follow such a magnificent jam with anything better (though "Stuffed Tomatoe" does get pretty scatter-brained after a few minutes). So good.
While at work on a sunny summer day I heard something interesting on the speakers. I thought, "Is this the new Ryan Adams? But it's…good!" It wasn't Ryan Adams, and that guy still stinks. It turned out to be Loudon Wainwright III. Album II. "Me & My Friend the Cat." I started doing a bit of research and found that Loudon has existed on the periphery of fame for nearly 40 years. As the singing surgeon on M*A*S*H*, the original sidekick to David Letterman, and the dad of both Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Loudon has reasons for fame aside from his incredible 38 year, 22 album career.
I found that some of his music was a little hit and miss, but overall, bafflingly good. He mixes humour with heart-wrenching pain, nostalgia, and self-deprecation better than any songwriter I've ever heard. He was originally heralded as "the new Bob Dylan", but unlike Dylan, Loudon didn't reinvent himself a dozen times, never lied about where he came from, and doesn't suck live.
His talent lies in his willingness to discuss personal details fully and precisely, such as the time he hit Martha in the car, or his divorce from Kate McGarrigle, or his career failures. Loudon can construct songs in a variety of genres- lounge, reggae, folk, country, rock, blues- and always sound comfortable and authentic. A reggae song about being a pathetic tourist in Jamaica, or a rowdy bar song about the alcoholic implications of dinner parties with friends ("drinks before dinner and wine with dinner and after-dinner drinks"), or a cheesy "Running-On-Empty"-esque country song about his biggest fan (both literally and figuratively) being a bigger fan of both Bob Dylan and Neil Young: this is all just typical Loudon- personal, funny, and poignant.
All this has gotten him a decent career and following, but rarely any commercial success. His only real single was "Dead Skunk," a minor AM radio hit over 35 years ago. He's had acting roles in a variety of things, notably Tim Burton's "Big Fish," and the TV show "Undeclared," but it's probably too late for a full-blown entry into stardom. So ol' Loudo will have to remain on the fringes, as he's done for nearly 40 years, getting his name spelled wrong on marquees worldwide.
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