Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

Let's try this again!

happy new year george and all the rockers on the thread!

okay i'm here but i'm listening to ramsey lewis right now so i'm no help to anyone.

Thanks! Happy New Year to Blighty!

I never learn. Am listening to Tsunami Bomb's The Ultimate Escape and ... Vans mall punk rock.

What caused everyone to think filling your records with Yo-ho-ho who-oh singing constituted passable vocals? I'd say it started with Oi! except I liked a lot of the early soccer hooligan style. But soccer-style vocals and
four-note ranges, even by a girl, Agent M, it just always sounds like duffers in the US.

There's the backline guys shouting in unison and the guitarist who plays through a Mashall half stack but manages to nullify the entire history of such a thing by just playing wall-to-wall chugga-chugga-chugga. So to inject dynamics they either play quietly a little or do a breakdown, a little syncopated 8-bar drum fill where everyone in the band does their jump around thing.

Even so, it's all produced orders of magnitude better than records in the Seventies, and they stumble into one or two catchy tunes per record, which I suppose was the entire appeal.

Seems to me Joan Jett shares some blame for this since she tended to be found of who-o-oah soccer sing vocals on an off and on basis.

I blame the Misfits (who I never liked much tbh) then Naked Raygun (who had moments, at least early on, but still weren't good enough to be an oi! band).

Happy new ears, one and all!

Then there's the parts in four or five songs where the guitar does a power chord chomp -- the amp squeals atonally -- another power chord chomp -- another atonal squeal -- repeat as necessary. Follow up with pick scrape and dive into a polka beat.

Yeah, the Misfit definitely put the lame soccer vocal into things. And you've just reminded me I actually shared a few bills with Naked Raygun. Ughh, you can just imagine how great that was.

happy new yearz yoo guys! continue with the rock and everything.

i love old misfits. i never understood chuck's not liking of them. catchy, rocking, um, fun haircuts. "we bite" is one of my fave turbo-charged punk anthems ever.

i like how one of the only bands the grong grong drummer lists as inspiration in the liner-notes of that reissue is the 4skins! can't remember the other ones he names. i think the meteors might have been one. i can't even remember what the meteors sounded like.

I remember seeing the Misfits a number of times. When "Cough/Cool" was about a year old they used to play in Bethlehem regularly. That got them a local following and they eventually graduation to Northampton Community College. The
punks turned one a school administrator's car on its side in the parking lot and that was the end of punk rock at community colleges in the Valley.

The gig was full but not particularly good. The Misfits played so loud they overpowered the PA and since Danzig was the reason and man for their songs, they pretty much got lost in a whirl of white noise and drumming. Danzig had the fist shake and flex a muscle at the audience thing down pretty good even then.

Way to go, Scott. I'm listenin' to Baby for the second time today! Hotcha good ol' boy Texas boogie which they must have amusingly thought had better percentages than it did due to likes of ZZ Top and Johnny Winter. Speaking of which John Dawson Winter III is a perfect album for tonight!

that baby album does hit the spot. played s/t point blank album today too! between that and growl and stray dog i was rockin' up a storm on main street in greenfield.

so the spontaneous combustion twofer import cd (of both albums) sells for either 25 dollars or 85 dollars on amazon??? take your pick! illegal downloading means you get to eat tomorrow! where's that slogan?

between that and growl and stray dog i was rockin' up a storm on main street in
greenfield

You ain't kidding. Probably good you had the second Stray Dog. The first one with Point Black's first and Baby might have caused a knuckle-dragging black hole, ripping up a bit of the
asphalt in town, frightening the locals.

the locals are easily frightened, but they buy molly hatchet albums from me, so i got lots of love for them.

the hard rock roots run deep in western mass. this was the big party band around these parts in the 70's:

http://www.popsike.com/pix/20060824/150023924726.jpg

Feeling the need for the iron fist here at 11:09, so put on the Rufus Huff CD. Despite a few shortcomings, the most manly thing in league with the Point Blank/Montrose/Baby/Jukin Bone style this year.

Of course, they look just like 'em, too. What is it? Ontogeny predicates/recapitulates phylogeny, or you're a reptile then a bird sometime in the womb, no matter the year, just depends on where you choose to tap it. Or is it vice versa? Anyway, it's in the DNA if you want it.

Or you can still call up the cave man if necessary.

Slated after Rufus Huff, Savoy Brown's Skin 'n' Bone, then Silverhead's 16 & Savaged and the first and only Broken Glass album.

Hard to believe people actually were watching Daughtry in New Yawk. Can't think of a better example of white milchtoast pansies on the one day of the year where even the teetotalers are given a dispensation to rupture their livers, on national TV.

you know what, you can laugh at them and scorn them and knock them down and ridicule their every move, but black eyed peas were the ONLY thing on t.v. tonight that resembled a party. or a party atmosphere. they KNOW how to move a crowd. no mean feat these days. everyone else needs to be dunked in hot water till death or near death.

That's true!

It's actually only four after midnight here in soCal.

Listening to the Marcus s/t album, which I downloaded after it was mentioned on the 2009 thread, and I just noticed that the opening track, "Black Magic," begins with a riff that's straight up stolen from Deep Purple's "Space Truckin." Play 'em back to back - it's the same riff.

Coincidentally, I was playing my The Very Best Of Montrose CD (Warner Archives/Rhino, 2000) in the background while sorting and folding laundry just a few evenings ago, and I noticed that one of their songs sounded exactly like Deep Purple, too. (Didn't make a mental note of which Montrose song, or which Deep Purple song, but the former definitely wasn't one of their songs that sound more like the MC5, and the latter definitely wasn't "Hush.")

d'oh, new thread! happy belated new year's, ya'll! i'm rah-rah-rockin' Boney M at the moment so i should probably not be seen anywhere near these here parts and environs. but what the hell... "ohhh those Russians"

Re Montrose, sounding like Deep Purple, "Jump On It," I bet. Don't think Montrose added keys until after Hagar left which would be "Warner Bros. Presents..." and the alb, "Jump On It." If it was "Jump On It," it's Jimmy Alcivar who went on with RM into Gamma. If it's from "Warner Bros. Presents..." it's Alan Fitzgerald, who went on to Night Ranger. Might have been some on "Paper Money" too and the song that comes closest to Deep Purple on that is "I Got the Fire."

Yeah, pretty sure it was one of those (and relistening to them confirms their relative Purpleness); I'm just not sure which one, off hand.

Now, two very late '70s records on the glam/prog/new wave/pub/pop cusp:

Bruce Wooley & the Camera Club (Columbia 1979) The guy who helped write "Video Killed The Radio Star" (which he does an alternate, maybe very marginally more "rock," version of here) for the Buggles, and his band features one "Tom Dolby" on keyboards. What I'm hearing on a lot of this album, especially stuff like "Dancing With The Sporting Boys" and "Johnny" in the middle of side one, is mid-'70s Sparks, thickening on occasion to Buzzcocks pop-punk ("You Got Class"), pomped-up Dave Clark Five garage ("Flying Man", a pretty cool "Glad All Over" rip), and/or maybe a less heavy version of Cheap Trick in their early concise arch and twisted mode (closer "You're The Circus {I'm The Clown}," probably the hardest rocker on the record.) Trouser Press Record Guide review calls it "an LP of light power pop strongly reminiscent of the Move," which probably half explains my Cheap Trick comparison too, though it's honestly not always that "light" --"English Garden" is definitely as cups-and-cakes British-twee as its name suggests, though. Also confused about that review's claim that "the music is too lodged in the '60s," given Dolby's weird and catchy synth doodles all over. All in all, I liked it way more than I'd remembered.

U.K. Squeeze (A&M 1978) And liked this less, except mainly the camel-jockeying "Take Me I'm Yours" (one of only two cuts not produced by John Cale), which still sounds excellent; only other cut where the guitars really even flirt with hard rock is five-minute side two opener "The Call," though a few cuts ("Sex Master," "Hesitation {Rool Britannia}," "Get Smart") do a fairly energetic Tin Pan Alley pub jump powerpop thing. Half of it seems fairly weak, though; songwriting not close to Cool For Cats, their great 1979 LP where they dropped the U.K. from their name even in the States. (They were always just Squeeze in the U.K.) And only "Take Me I'm Yours" really has the loopy Eurodisco-ish synth hooks that show up more on that followup album, and which the band pretty much gave up on as they got more respectable and anal-compulsive later. Hilariously clueless first/Red-edition Rolling Stone Record Guide review for the debut LP, from Dave Marsh: "Not to be confused with U.K., this group produces anonymous, pedestrian hard rock of the same vintage of the other's. By the end of 1978, this band was so defeated it changed its name to the simpler Squeeze." By the second edition of the book, the RS critics were slavering all over the later early '80s LPs. (Fwiw, I got as far as Argybargy, which I liked fine at the time, and never got into Eastside Story or anything later.) Anyway, needless to say, they never sounded nothing like U.K., nor very "hard rock" at all. Though maybe there's some very slight Queen influence in there somewhere.

Though, come to think of it, it's not like I've ever listened to the band U.K. much either, so what the hell do I know? (They were no good, right?)

Australian hard rock band Airbourne has a new album coming out in March, but they should have had a copy editor look at the title... http://bit.ly/85tUwY

The Peel Sessions versions of the early U.K. Squeeze tracks are much better...a lot more oomph on guitar and drums helps put things over. The Model turns out to be pretty good punky power pop.

Oh, I guess I wrote that in the other Squeeze thread. Still true, though!

Australian hard rock band Airbourne has a new album coming out in March, but they should have had a copy editor look at the title

Haw! Out-Tapishing Spinal Tap. Actually, that would be a good album title, too.

i never listened to the albums much, but the squeeze singles album is some kinda perfect. all i ever really needed, i guess.

So, what are generally considered the most rocking tracks on Ram Jam's Portrait Of A Young Ram (which I have already played twice in 2010 I'll have you know) and Earthquake's 8.5? Hard choice, but I'm leaning toward "The Kid Next Door," "Turnpike" (holy shit is this one heavy slog), "Runaway Runaway" (holy shit this is fast) and maybe "Hurricane Ride" on the Ram Jam, and "Savin My Love" (the 7-minute stretchout), "Motivate Me" (did Kiss ever do a song that good?), "Hit The Floor" (did the Raspberries ever do a song that good?) and maybe "Finders Keepers" and/or "Don't Want To Go Back" on the Earthquake, but I'm willing to take other offers. Both total killer LPs, either way (Even if Martin Popoff only likes one of the two bands. He does say "Finders Keepers" "truly deals the slashing metal," and compares the songs that sound like Kiss and the Raspberries only better to the Dictators. Seems he likes pretty much everything on the Ram Jam. Underrates their debut, naturally, but that's almost understandable.)

Oops, Portrait Of THE ARTIST AS a Young Ram I meant, duh. (But if you're on this thread, you already knew that anyway, right?)

You pegged the stuff on the second Ram Jam album. "The Kid Next Door" is the apex of the album, the first song, right? Completely different album and band than the first record which I like a little more although it's not nearly as hard. Better hooky basic rock 'n' roll on the debut, better screaming hard rock and metal on the second.

The three Earth Quake tunes all, I thought, have a bit of a soul hard rock thing which I never heard in the Dictators. Especially "Finders Keepers." Is the shortened version of "Knock On Wood" on 8.5 on it? It might have just been on Spitballs but it's in a similar
vein.

Popovic never seemed to like anything by Earth Quake. But he hears white guys who sing 'black' as as having problems staying on key, sometimes, which is all in his mind, not on record. And that definitely gave him a problem with Earth Quake.

Oddly, he never docked Steve Marriott for having the same trait.

Did Eric Carmen sound like the guy from Earth Quake? I never would have made that comparison.
"Go All the Way" like anything on Levelled[i], or the live album, or [i]8.5? Maybe some production touches. That's it.

hey, you guys, i LIKE the raspberries, i'll have you know. though they never rocked as hard as badfinger could rock on a good day. actually, that's not true. razzleberries had good rocking moments on record. you just gotta look for them.

i need to play portrait and 8.5 again soon. haven't played them in a long time. i still have a soft spot for that first earth quake album. need to play that soon too.

album that has rocked my world the most this week:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_B8EggxFk9qw/R9aFCxUmFII/AAAAAAAACOs/pQPx0zobn6Y/s320/C.K.Strong+2.jpg.jpg

played this very very loud the other night whilst working after hours at the store. there is an overdriven guitar moment on side one that actually made me - as the kids like to say - LAUGH OUT LOUD. at its beauty and audacity. at its sheer friggin' coolness! mama lion had their moments, but, really, if you own only one lynn carey album, this has got to be the one.

need to play portrait and 8.5 again

I still think Leveled and Rock the World, the first and live one on Beserkely, are the best.

I need to dig those out next. Pretty sure Leveled is actually my favorite. Also, fwiw, yeah, "Knock On Wood" is on that Spitballs sort-of-comp (which I talked about on last year's thread I think), not 8.5 And definitely think Earthquake have a certain hard powerpop edge to a couple songs, "Hit The Floor" for sure among them, though maybe there's a better reference point than the 'Berries, I dunno. Can definitely hear the soul influence in the vocals here and there, but no, he doesn't sound like Marriott (or Carmen). Suppose what makes me think Raspberries is just, uh, the super pretty melody or something.

"The Kid Next Door" is track 3 on the 2nd Ram Jam; opening cut is "Gone Wild." As for which LP I like more, it's a tossup; they're both so great, but I'd probably go with the more teen-glammy debut too if somebody held a gun to my heard. (Guess "Saturday Night" -- as in Bay City Rollers? -- is the LP #2 track that sounds most like LP #1.)

"...gun to my head..."

Playing Tommy Roe's 12 In A Row now; George was totally right about Moon Martin singing like him. Roe rocks more, though. (Before that, Little Honda by the Hondells, a Top 10 LP from 1964.)

Oops, wrong Whitburn book! "Little Honda" single (featuring Brian Wilson, Glen Campbell, Gary Usher, and some guy who went on to be in Sagitarrius) went to #9; album never got higher than #119 on the chart. "Originally a studio group assembled in Southern California by Usher," Joel Whitburn says; LP covers and tours featured other guys.

You got me digging out Earth Quake. At least half of 8.5 has a soul max r&b and -- I'd not cited this before when xhck brought it up -- some Who vibe.

Listen to "Little Cindy" -- the entire middle section is the Who. "Savin' My Love" is Brit invasion with big Peter Frampton modal guitar solos through the back end. There's also a big Rascals thing going on in the vocals. Which may make one think Dictators. "Motivate Me", though, works on an initial Townshend riff, which also heavily influenced as far as I can tell, maybe a third to a half of the Dics Manifest Destiny[i], particularly the the second side.

[I]Leveled had a lot of power pop, Paul Revere & the Raiders, soul hard rock and heavy Yardbirds/Aerosmith stuff. Pretty much encompassed the arc of their talent, eclectic, a little too spread out for what US audiences expected.

"Street Fever" and "Train Ride," for example, just kill as fast heavy rock 'n' roll guitar throwdown with shouting Brit invasion r&b combo vocals.

They did do a lot of work as a covers band, after all.

"Lovin' Cup" is their best song. Riveted me when I first heard it much like Starz' "Cherry Baby." A fair and great combination of radio axe-y hard rock and and radio ready pop.

Roe rocks more, though. (Before that, Little Honda by the Hondells, a Top 10 LP from 1964.)

My brother was a serious Tommy Roe 10-12 year old boy groupie, a big part of his audience. I heard this stuff every other day for a period of a 9 months to a year out of his bedroom.

so, i told m. popoff and don waller from the imperial dogs that they should post on this thread cuz its there kinda thing, but who knows, they might just stay dirty lurkers. figured it might be their kinda thing.

digging a record by boffalongo on united artists today. need to listen more. i'll report back.

Popoff interviewed me for a half hour yesterday morning over the phone for some show VH-1 is putting together about the history of metal (hair-metal episode specifically, apparently)! Not sure whether they're gonna send a camera to Austin or not.

And speaking of Moon Martin (well, I mentioned him a few posts up), I'm sure everybody is getting sick of me talking about him on these hard rock threads when he's not, uh, really hard rock enough, but I decided that the first side of that Southwind LP What A Place To Land is actually a bit too mellow and Deadheady for me to love it. Second side ("Dynamite" and "Buzz Me" and "Bootleg Woman" which Moon later redid) gets a little more boogiefied, but not all that much more boogiefied, and I definitely prefer the guy slicked up a few years later as a rockabilly new waver than as a rustic hippie, band or no.

And speaking of rockabilly new wave, Keith Sykes's I'm Not Strange I'm Just Like You turns out to be a surprisingly fun surrogate Dave Edmunds LP from 1980, especially in "928" (which may or may not concern the time a train is leaving) and "Makin' It Before We Get Married" (the latter of which could easily pass for a Nick Lowe composition from that era.) Don't think I've ever heard another Sykes album, though. (Like that album marginally more than Billy Swan's likewise rockabillified Rock N Roll Moon from 1975, though his mature vision of the genre is charming in its own way, plus Swan covers "Ubangi Stomp," very much an anomaly both for its less mature energy and barely subverted racism. And by now, this probably belongs on the country thread, so never mind.)

Er, the part of that one song that seems like a "Nick Lowe composition" to me is the words (about a couple -- whose astrological signs are named, even -- having sex a lot before being wed), and maybe the melody. But the album's sound, at least in its more raucous half (that song included) is way more towards the Edmunds side, guitars on down.

This blog post below says that Sykes (who has apparently written songs for Jimmy Buffett and Rosanne Cash, judging from Google) is one of the few onetime Saturday Night Live musical guests who does not have his own Wikipedia page. (I know basically nothing about him myself; just paid $1 for that LP because it looked, uh, so new wave rockabilly.)

http://onepoorcorrespondent.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-in-world-is-richard-baskin.html

Popoff interviewed me for a half hour yesterday morning over the phone for some show VH-1 is putting together about the history of metal (hair-metal episode specifically, apparently)!

They'll have plenty of stock footage from the special on the same subject two years ago. Will they again waste their time trying to get Mike Saunders to cooperate?

what the hell is mike listening to these days anyway. is he still on the disney pop train to tomorrowland?

No, now it's stream-of-consciousness e-mail on Lady Gaga. And Deep Purple video on YouTube. Or stuff about the kids who volunteer to run the merch table at Samoans shows and the debilitating (my assessment, I've seen a few) multi- mall and high school football jock punk/hardcore bands on the bills in places like Santa Cruz.

Ah, 'Horns fans are all over my side of town today, so I gotta start getting ready for a Apt du Smith
college football party. Did you know Jordan Shipley has threatened to be a country music singer/songwriter if the pros don't pan out? It worked spectacularly for Mike Reid.

he makes me dizzy. in a good way, i think. speaking of which, i wonder how don's doing. he hasn't posted on ilm in a long time i don't think. hope he's okay. don a. that is.

'Horns fans are all over my side of town today

Ha ha, they were out in droves here today too, needless to say -- shopping for burnt orange tailgate food all through the grocery store, even though they'll have to get pretty sloshed to be tailgating on a 20 degree temperature / 5 degree windchill night in Austin (coldest night in two years, or something like that.) Then it's going down to 16 on Friday -- hey, I thought I left to the north to get away from that.

Don posted his Nashville Scene ballot on Rolling Country a few weeks ago. Haven't seen him much in these parts otherwise lately.

Burned John Parr's solo from 1985 back-to-back with the Nig-Heist's Snort My Load from 1984.

An interestingly schizo but slightly congruent set of values, John Parr being after the same thing as Mugger but more elegantly and tunefully, if less bone-jarring.

"Naughty Naughty" going well with "Hot Muff," "Woman Drivah," and "Balls of Fire." The Nig-Heist 'tunes,' the few better among them anyway are probably aided guitarwise by an uncredited Greg Ginn. His style is unmistakable although it's not on all of them by any means.

"St. Elmo's Fire" -- about a guy in a wheelchair -- coulda been just the material for a Nig-Heist like treatment. Although I still like it fine the way it is.

Most of John Parr is acceptable Foreigner/Nightranger-type stuff. Very glittery 80's movie as you
recall, right there with the same from Heart during the period.

Paradoxically, I saw both bands -- Parr opening for Heart at Lehigh and Nig-Heist for Black Flag in Philly. I can recall Parr doing "Naughty Naughty" and "St. Elmo's Fire," nothing about the Nig-Heist except Mugger shouting and wearing a wig. It probably sounded better maybe if you were in the front row and I wasn't.

For some reason, at the time, I always heard "Naughty Naughty" as a rip of Billy Squier's "The Stroke" (a/k/a also more or less the same funk-metal category as "Dragon Attack" by Queen.) Though I guess Foreigner's "Urgent" would be in a similar ballpark. Never liked "St. Elmo's Fire" back then, but now you've piqued my curiosity a little.

Oh come now. "St. Elmo's Fire" epitomized everything jolly and happy about the mid-Eighties back when you still thought everything was still going to work out all right. Listen to it through a gentle drunken haze and you'll be fine. Parr's solo album is the very essence of happy mid-Eighties AOR. He must have made a good fortune on the publishing for those two songs.

Parr's best known movie tie-in was definitely the St. Elmo's Fire theme, but I'll always remember "Naughty Naughty" for its use in the excellent vampire movie Near Dark. It soundtracks the movie's centerpiece, a scene where a gang of road-warrior vampires (they travel the Southwest in a camper with the windows blacked out) slaughter everyone in a crappy little redneck bar.

Got the new Airbourne disc in the mail today. Only played the first two songs so far, but I liked 'em a lot better than I remember liking the debut. The press release claims they slept in the studio during the recording sessions, 'cause that's the way Brooooooce did it back in the '70s.

I didn't recall that but Near Dark I do. It was a great movie. Adrian Pasdar vs. Lance
Henricksen and his crew.

are you guys down with the backstreet girls? i've never heard them, but this album cover kinda makes me want to.

https://www.bootlegbooze.com/shop/images/BsgBoogieSvart.jpg

backstreet girls have a lot of albums. including Hellway To High and Sick My Duck!

i still really need to listen to american dog too. i'm always afraid that they won't live up to their album covers.

http://www.badreputation.fr/images/albums/american_dog_-_scars_n_bars.jpg

so this guy has a huge list up of all the hard rock/aor/metal he owns, and he has tons of recent hard rock i've never heard on it. i'm gonna investigate some of the bands:

http://rateyourmusic.com/lists/list_view?list_id=73740&show=100&start=0

for instance, 2009 album by the band '77. any good? it's called 21st century rock.

http://hardrockhideout.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/7721stcenturyrock.jpg

01 Gimme Rock 'n' Roll
02 Hard Working Liar
03 Big Smoker Pig
04 Shake It Up
05 Wicked Girl
06 Your Game's Over
07 Less Talk (Let's Rock)
08 Let The Children Hear Rock 'n' Roll
09 Double-Tongued Woman
10 21st Century Rock

i wanna hear this airborne album too:

http://image.space.rakuten.co.jp/lg01/00/0000534900/90/imgc1d7715azik6zj.jpeg

1 Stand Up for Rock 'n' Roll 4:01
2 Runnin' Wild 3:38
3 Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast 3:42
4 Diamond in the Rough 2:53
5 Fat City 3:26
6 Blackjack 2:42
7 What's Eatin' You 3:36
8 Girls in Black 3:15
9 Cheap Wine & Cheaper Women 3:10
10 Heartbreaker 3:56
11 Let's Ride 3:28

http://www.amiright.com/album-covers/images/album_American-Dog-If-You-Want-BudYouve-Got-It.jpg

i love the fact that serious hardcore hard rock/aor fans own EVERY russ ballard album. that is commitment.

underground aor fans are the only people who still buy pat benatar albums.

go ahead, google this band, i dare you:

http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/big_cock/big_cock/

track-list for the big cock album:

Second Coming 0:21
2 Fucked Up 2:53
3 Real Man 3:12
4 Ride on Me 2:53
5 Rock Hard 2:45
6 She's a Lady 2:53
7 So Easy Bein' Me 3:07
8 Every Inch of My Love 2:40
9 Dirty Girl 2:56
10 Scottsdale Girls 2:31
11 Get Me Up 2:37
12 Take Me 2:33

What I could stand to hear from Big Cock was pretty submediocre despite the great fools-hall-of-fame name and audacious cover. Chigger Red was an average soCal bar band popular about a decade ago.

We used to like Crash Kelly around these parts but sadly the enthusiasm did not catch on.

I have Dirty Rig's Rock Did It laying around somewhere and liked it some, surprising since Mr. Warrior Soul has always given me a rash.

Doomfox got love on this thread a couple years ago. Typical Australian bar-fighters.

The Kevin Dubrow solo album was a great selection of glam rock covers. I think he even put a well done Budgie number on it.

The Flairs Shut Up and Drive was consistantly fair to good as pop punk metal.

Foghat Live II is actually great. And then band -- since half of Foghat 1.0 is dead, should probably be called Foghat 2.0.

Fozzy was Stuck Mojo fronted by wrestler Chris Jericho and terrible. Wasn't it started as a joke band with some manner of Spinal Tap-ish false history?

Funny Money's Stick It was great, call it Kix 2.0

Couldn't stand Get Animal. Wasn't that some celebrity rocker group?

Girlschool has consistantly been given love here for their more recent records.

Great White's Tribute to Led Zeppelin was decent and had the advantage of not making you feel you were a leering old cod if you listened to Zepparella or Lez Zeppelin CDs.

I used to see the Hangman in Hollywood a lot. They made fairly monotonous hard rock records with an I'm a loneseome ex-junkie rocker cowboy vibe. However each one always contained one or two keepers. Much more entertaining in 45 minute live sets.

Hot Leg is a successor band to The Darkness and everyone seems to have ignored it.

I have an Iced Earth box set with their first four albums included and like most of it.

Michael Katon has been making Brownsville Station/George Thurrygood-like albums forever. Every one as good as any other.

Aynsley Lister is a Brit guitar hero I mentioned briefly late last year. Does blues rock with a lot of modern US country rock style thrown in, that is I liked him a lot better than Jason Aldean.

Paperback Freud is a great fools-hall-of-fame-name.

Every Axel Rudi Pell record ever made has moments of greatness and even greater cover art.

Why would you call yourself Powerage? It's like putting a kick-me sign on your butt.

There's a new Shakin' Street album, Love Channel?

Shitbone Loves Your Wife is a great thing to say. Any album would almost have to be a letdown.

Silvertide's Show and Tell was sure great sounding but Philly appears to have swallowed them up after they were the house band in the Lady in the Water movie.

Steve Stevens Memory Crash got an honorable mention here.

Xtian band from San Diego, Thieves & Liars, made a good album mention well late on last year's thread.

Pete Wells, Angry Anderson & the Damn Fine band is Rose Tattoo doing classic rock covers, which you like when you hear it the first time.

jeez louise that guy owns 17 gary moore records. that is a whole lot of gary moore.

11 night ranger albums is likewise taking things to extremes.

and yet owning 13 saxon albums seems fine to me.

had no idea that there was a new shakin' street album either. although nothing surprises me in reunion world.

What I wrote about Funny Money a couple years ago:

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2008/10/funny-money-kix-starts-your-heart.html

First Airbourne album (which wasn't that good tbh) + Rich and Famous:

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2008/03/airbourne-and-the-rich-famous-do-dirty-deeds-dirt-cheap.html

On Crash Kelly (in Harp):

CRASH KELLY Electric Satisfaction (Liquor & Poker) On their debut last year, these riff-and-tune-happy Canadians gave a Cheap Trick song Gary Glitter beats, cribbed from Aerosmith’s “Same Old Song and Dance,” and louie-louied a “Since You Been Gone” (formerly Rainbow’s and Head East’s) that gave Kelly Clarkson a run for her money. This year they exhume Alice Cooper’s necrophilia classic “Cold Ethyl” after powerpopping a couple cracked-actress glam originals, and I had to google to make sure those weren’t covers, too: “She Put the Shock (in My Rock and Roll),” which talks about ’74 and ’75 and which could’ve been done first by Mott the Hoople or Slade but wasn’t, and “33 on the Charts,” sort of like if Bowie rewrote Pete Wingfield’s “Eighteen With a Bullet” except it’s about riding a superstar’s coattails onto the cover of NME. (Math-rock alert: “Count On Me, Count On You”)

George on Crash Kelly and other current glam-rock bands:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-07-26/music/wham-bam-thank-you-glam/

Me on the most recent Night Ranger album (in Blurt):

NIGHT RANGER Hole In The Sun (VH1 Classic)
Yeah, that Night Ranger. Not only are Jack Blades and Co. still around; they recently even entertained the troops at Guantanamo. Their late ‘90s Seven and Neverland are smarter and more muscular melodic rock albums than you’d ever suspect, and so is this one; in fact, give or take the inspirational-piano blandout “There is Life,” the most ignorable track here may well be the “bonus” acoustic retooling of their eternal Boogie Nights Nerf-metal prototype “Sister Christian.” They have more luck with a lovely unplugged-Zep-style update of 1983’s “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me,” but the real keepers are new music: Power-funk metal with pompy chord progressions in “Tell Your Vision”; Marilyn Manson horror beats under Judas Priest overdrive and clearer singing than either in “You’re Gonna Hear From Me”; Everclear verses surrounding a sterling ‘80s hard-pop chorus in “Whatever Happened”; Electric Six-as-Robert Palmer machismo in “Drama Queen.” They even do a “Rockstar” song – take that, Nickelback!

On Axel Rudi Pell's last album (scroll down -- also an exactly one-year-old comment from George about Panzerballet's name that I never noticed until just this second):

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2009/01/panzerballet-panzerballet-bad-land-this.html

i'm actually listening to Died Pretty right now (free dirt album). i didn't think i knew their stuff at all, but the first song i'm hearing "blue sky day" i totally remember from college radio. singer sounds like the flesheaters guy and a little like chris bailey and a little like the guy from straightjacket fits. and the music is definitely (latter day)saints. i actually like this a little! doesn't really belong here though. belongs on that bodeans/cruzados/green on red thread probably. are thin white rope fans the only people who still listen to old died pretty albums?

Nah, mainly just aging Australians. I actually kinda liked that Free Dirt reissue a couple years ago, though; also last month I pulled out my copy of the Caressing Swine (...And Some History) CD that Columbia put out in the U.S. in 1994 (and I apparently bought at Repo Records in Philly for $2.99 a few years later), and liked it more than I thought I would. But sure, they could have rocked harder; no question. I posted a little about them somewhere on this thread:

Died Pretty C/D S/D

i was probably still listening to hunters & collectors when free dirt came out.

George on American Dog and other early '00s biker rockers:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-01-14/music/ride-hard-die-hard/

I actually reviewed Free Dirt for Creem Metal when it came out! (I still have the hard copy, but it's nowhere on the web.)

i like it. i have one of the EPs you like too. next to nothing. gonna play that today sometime.

Oh, no I remember, Get Animal was Adam Bomb. And he had a thing for putting Vern Troyer on his covers, twice. That worked well.

Just gave Earth Quake's live '75 Rocking The World a spin -- definitely has more of the soul/r&b/boogie influence that George mentioned above than 8.5 which I talked about above, and I assume Leveled too -- and yeah, maybe even some Marriot in the vocals, though Gary Phillips (who sings the cover of Marriot's Small Faces' "Tin Soldier'") only gets one lead vocal, as does Stan Miller who totally fucking kills ELO's "Ma Ma Ma Belle", basically turning it into the Slade song (look at the title) it deserved to be all along. John Doukas lead-vocals the rest, and he's got more suburban whiteboy in his singing I think; still really like what he does with the Easybeats' "Friday On My Mind." All told, only three originals out of eight tracks. (They also cover "Route 66" and Lou Reed's "Head Held High.") At first I was thinking the album was maybe a little too humorlessly purist/bar-band-boogie stodgy compared to the other Earth Quake ones I've heard (basically the impression I got about Brownsville Station's nonetheless still good also-'75 Motor City Connection the other day fwiw), but a few cuts in, it really kicked in. Apparently it was their third album; first two came out in '71 and '72 on A&M.

"Sittin' In the Middle of Madness" is probably the whitest thing they did. Hot riff and syncopation is the best part of it before the vocal, the song structure of which makes singing a bit out of reach. Anyway, I thought they were going for Aerosmith on "Sittin'" and the first time I saw the album I thought they were trying to look like 'em, too.

I had the '71 and '72 albums. "Trainride" came from them and they'd do it again for Leveled. They had a second live side recorded at Rockpalast in Germany and that appeared with a Beserkley Euro-only release with one side of Greg Kihn, one side of the Rubinoos, one side of Tyla Gang, and Earth Quake. It was in support of their Leveled tour and the band is a bit more guitar muscled and pro/less garage on it.

i really like the second album *why don't you try me*. never heard the first one. but the first one is supposedly their least rocking. trainride is on the second album. why don't you try me can usually be found cheap.

i never see the live album used. i can only imagine that three or four people total even bought it new.

so, basically, i've never heard the first album, the live album, and the last album, two years in a padded cell. and i like the 2nd album, 8.5, and leveled. that about covers it for me for now.

earth quake were on a dutch ariola records comp in 1977 called GEEF VOOR NEW WAVE. check out the track-listing:

A1 The Rubinoos - Rock and Roll is Dead
A2 The Motors - Dancing the Night Away
A3 Johnny Moped - No One
A4 Eddie and the Hot Rods - Do Anything You Wanna Do
A5 The Adverts - Gary Gilmore's Eyes
A6 Generation X - Your Generation
A7 X-Ray Spex - Oh Bondage Up Yours!
A8 Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers - Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll
B1 Jonathan Richman - Roadrunner
B2 Sex Pistols - Pretty Vacant
B3 Motörhead - Motorhead
B4 Dwight Twilley Band - I'm On Fire
B5 The Radiators From Space - Television Screen
B6 Radio Stars - Dirty Pictures
B7 Earth Quake - Trainride

that's my kinda punk comp!

i can only imagine that three or four people total even bought it new.

Then I was one of 'em.

I used to have the Radio Stars album with "Dirty Pictures" on it. Great song, can't remember much else about the rest of it except it was glammy hard rock.

Oh My God! "Sex Shop" on Shakin' Street's 2009 reunion, "21st Century Love Channel," is almost as good as "Suzie Wong," right down to the Toss the Ross the solo. About Fabienne working in a sex shop on Place Pigalle in Paris, naturally. Maybe she actually did because she puts herself into it. Gotta like her
FrancoisEnglish, though. "I sell them gadgets that you wind; I turn them on and blow their muaaau-ind!"

Oh I'm gonna have to tease ya xhuxk on 21st Century Love Channel -- you're definitely going to want to dig this one up as it is to Shakin' Street's cat what the 2008 Rose Tattoo album was to theirs.

A total surprise, starting slow and then all of a sudden the songwriting kicks at the halfway point and band runs off five really good songs in a row. Addition of organ, which the old records didn't use, gives it a happy swagger plus some Who's Next sequencer sound in places.

"Streets of San Francisco" seemingly takes back to the second Shakin' Street album. Seems to contain references to her old beau, Damon Edge.

First couple listens and I rate this about as good or as good as that record. While "Sex Shop" and "San Francisco" aren't quite as good as "Suzie Wong," there's nothing as bad as "I Want to Box You" on here.

When you start the CD the first couple bits seem average. After which out trots the good stuff and
everyone's on fire with the glory of it by the end. Not bad.

Okay, I obviously need to figure out a way to get ahold of that record. (Had no idea until yesterday that it existed, either -- And I'm somebody who actually likes "I Want To Box You"!)

Decided that, once you get past "Black Betty," the second side of the first Ram Jam album is way better than the first side, which really does come off kinda pre-fabricated, somehow. Second-best song is almost for sure the closer "Too Bad On Your Birthday," which starts like "Bang A Gong" and which Joan Jett covered a few years later. But "404" sounds like the guitarist had been listening to "Stranglehold," "High Steppin'" has some really cool prog Allmans type thing going on, and the '70s high school parking lot bubblegum boogie of "Overloaded" and "Hey Boogie Woman" are also very neat. (Also just noticed that Tuff Darts get a partial writing credit for "All For The Love Of Rock N' Roll" at the end of Side One; still don't know if they were any good.)

you definitely need the tuff darts album! it's great!

B5 The Radiators From Space - Television Screen
B6 Radio Stars - Dirty Pictures

I don't think I've ever heard either of these bands -- both on Chiswick, apparently -- or given a second of thought to them before. Now I'm curious. ("No One" by Johnny Moped is absolute godhead, though.)

love that johnny moped album. i have a radio stars 12 inch single on chiswick. it's good.

Some notes starting at the permalink below on the new Shooter Jennings, 7DayBinge, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Legendary Shack Shakers albums -- the first two of which are way more (mostly shitty) loud/hard rock than country; the latter two definitely have hard-rocking parts:

Rolling Country 2010

Houston glam-rock revival band currently getting some local press and radio attention here; the song I heard, "Five Dollar Fame", had some recognizable remnants of '70s Bowie and Tim Curry in it somewhere, but still sounded really fuzzy, half-cooked and underproduced to my ears:

http://www.myspace.com/rokymoonandbolt

Guy on the radio then said "Texas glam has happened before, though," and played a song by Alejandro Escovedo's apparent old band Buick MacKane, which song also sounded fuzzy, half-cooked, and underproduced (and also not even as good as Guns N' Roses' cover of said T. Rex song).

Best glam-rock-revival album I heard last year came from these guys, from Boston. Not sure whether I ever mentioned them. I still have their CD after more than a year, but it still seems kind of marginal somehow:

http://www.myspace.com/genedantestarlets

http://www.genedante.com/

Minnesota glam/trannie hard rock band I had a brief infatuation with in the early '00s. Don't have any of their CDs anymore, but last month I listened to a CD-R I made of a metal show I did for Village Voice web Radio in 2001, and their song "Lust" actually still sounded good to me. Not sure whether their lineup or music has deteriorated since, though:

http://www.myspace.com/atph

I was also really into these guys, from Pittsburgh. Not as glammy, but definitely hard rock, and I still have a couple CDs. Still around, apparently, though I haven't kept up with them for the past few years:

http://www.myspace.com/ashestoashesmusic

Just determined that Fastway's 1984 All Fired Up is split more or less evenly between songs that sound like Led Zeppelin had 14 or so years before (Side One, best examples: "Misunderstood," "Station," and much slower ooze blooze "Hurtin' Me") and songs that sound like Cinderella would four years later (Side Two, best examples: "Tell Me," "If You Could See".) Can't think offhand of anybody who's done Zep better, overall, since In Through The Out Door (which isn't exactly what I said in my review of Fastway's self-titled 1983 debut in Stairway, which still doesn't explain why I ranked it way down at #389 and then got rid of my copy after the book came out.) Anyway -- killer rhythm section including ex-Humble Pie Jerry Shirley on drums, Dave King's a great lemon squeezing squealer, and Fast Eddie Clarke's on guitar. How come nobody talks about these guys anymore? ("All Fired Up," the title track, is also an excellently speedy NWOBHM facsimile.) Popoff actually gave the debut a 10, though, and this followup just a 6, but I don't remember the first one being that much better (if it was, it's got to be one of the greatest rock albums of all time.)

Speaking of Zepalikes, I heard Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again" over the car radio a few weeks back, and thought it totally sucked eggs. But I guess "Still Of The Night" was their great Zep rip, right? I haven't owned any of their albums for decades, though; maybe they had other ones. (Also have no recollection of whether Kingdom Come were any good.)

Hah, Dave King's been in the Flogging Mollys for years where he does very little lemon squealing.

Kingdom Come did the bald-faced "Kashmir" rip. I still have their second record "In Your Face." It's better than the abuse they got but not by a great deal. The main thing is the singer spent so much time sounding like Robert Plant that he can't easily not sound like Percy, so it still sounds like Zep. But it has the late-Eighties hair metal overproduction so it never really sounds like Zep when you get right down to it. It's a big blocky hard rock and metal album with the usual bits of overwraughtness and howling in the gail.

Makes sense, huh?

Actually, I don't think Plant does much lemon squealing himself these days. (Though maybe I did overstate King's squeal at least...a little.)

Thing about Whitesnake is the US audience mostly knows the band by the big production Eighties sexy video completely over the top thing. That band's utterly different from first half career Whitesnake which is Deep Purple with Glenn Hughes kicked out and Juicy Lucy guitarists all to do extended blooz rock with David Coverdale doing his almost-Percy impressions. Doesn't sound like Zep. A comfortably stodgy Brit hard rock band with lots of name value, successful in Britain, unheard of over hear until makeover. I have a live album from the Hammersmith Odeon. It's pretty much an excersize in 7 to 12 minute numbers. About five songs on it, sort of like the first live Rainbow album.

A couple years ago the old Whitesnake cranked up their career in Europe again with a couple releases as Band of Snakes. Stodgy friendly arena-ready mid-Seventies blooz rock, acceptable as live recordings if you like that stuff.

The original single version of "Here I Go Again" isn't a band at all, just famous ringers and Coverdale produced by Dan Huff before he was famous in Nashville. So Taylor Swift should probably cover it.

Gene Dante made me laugh, perhaps coincidentally. He could be that urbane guy in the new Geico
commercials who asks the rhetorical question, only he shows a stud in his tongue and wears sunglasses.

One of the songs on the page sounded straight from Seventies Brit glam, Alvin Stardust rather than
Ziggy, but decent. The horn charts in it were key. The other two had an indie minstrel cabaret thing going, but US in flavor which messes up the Euro Bowie Brian Ferry thing it seems to be aiming for.

my brother used to play this a lot when we were kids:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kkCHUk87bYc/SLviIBfOy7I/AAAAAAAAJeA/13DKaDJaZxc/s400/Whitesnake+-+Live+in+the+Heart+of+the+City+(2007).jpg

not long ago i visited my brother and he gave me his original copy of this which rules and i was very happy to hear it again:

http://www.metalkingdom.net/album/img/d40/1589.jpg

just thought of it cuz its another example of pre-mtv-big-hit-80's version of longstanding band.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Whitesnake-liveathammersmith1.jpg/200px-Whitesnake-liveathammersmith1.jpg

This is the alb I was referring to. Functionally identical to Live..Inna Heart of the City.

Thumping extended blooz rock punctuated with gails of howling. "Been mistreated!" for the fifth or sixth time on record. Cue Stormbringer next.

That Whitesnake Live...In The Heart Of The City album was reissued in 2007 as a two-CD set. Boosted it all the way up to 15 tracks.

burn and stormbringer are always gonna be my favorite coverdale moments. but i STILL need a copy of come taste the band cuz i'm a tommy bolin fan and i'd probably dig it. never even heard it!

Whitesnake Live...In The Heart Of The City

Breakaway Records in Austin had an LP copy of this on sale for $1 a couple months ago. Considered buying it, too. Maybe I should have.

Listening to it now. It's pretty good.

The update reissue may have the tracks from Live at Hammersmith. I remember the two seeming to come from the same set of performances. So I got out my old copy -- a Japanese deluxe CD with sash and booklet -- and mine has "Come On," "Might Just Take Your Life," "Lie Down," "Ain't No Love In the Heart of the City" , "Trouble," and "Mistreated."

It's very much the thumping blooz rock and party album. Mostly, it has Coverdale sounding most like Paul Rogers. "Ain't No Love In the Heart of the City" actually steals from a Free tune I can't quite put my finger on, "I'll be Creepin'," I think. There's even a Grand Funk-ish quality to some of -- "Might Just Take Your Life" and "Lie Down" with Coverdale doing the cool hard rock soul man vocal ala the kind of things Farner and Don Brewer were fond of. "Trouble" owns a lot of modern country rock, particularly
Jason Aldean. Who I'd bet had Whitesnake imports at some point.

"Mistreated" has Coverdale reverting to his Percy stylings.

It's hard not to smile at this stuff. Coverdale's likably oafish and the band is totally unflash, no Blackmore-isms from the guitarists, just the facts, ma'am.

New Disney atrocity in the fake heavy metal band show meme: Iron Weasel.

Couldn't get through more than thirty seconds of two-cased songs, one called Pull My Finger, which one might think would be OK in the hands of someone genuinely crass and not writing for kids TV. But that's not the case here.

You can whip these songs out in 3 minutes tops, I'd think, particularly if you have a library of digital heavy metal riffs and drum lines. Then all you needs is some fool to sing a little although some of that is probably also buyable in bits and pieces now, too.

And here we are bagging on "Here I Go Again" and old Kingdom Come. Sacre bleu.

One thing about David Coverdale was that he knew the value of getting good musicians in. Steve Vai, Cozy Powell, Neil Murray, Colin "Bomber" Hodgkinson (those last 2 both from a jazz fusion background), etc etc. Although I guess Bernie Marsden and Mickey Moody had to go if they ever wanted to get on MTV. Adrian Vandenberg looked like the kind of guy who'd bring his own wardrobe to the band, unlike Jon Lord.

Okay, so anybody want to give me a good reason why I shouldn't get rid of my CD of L.A. sleaze-glam revival band Vains Of Jenna's 2006 Lit Up/Let Down, which has mostly been gathering dust around my abode for the past three or four years? Just tried playing it again today -- twice -- and it just really sounds generic. Guess somebody knowing that genre at all seemed refreshing in '06, but really, who cares? Do you?

Here's their myspace, if you need your memory refreshed:

http://www.myspace.com/vainsofjenna

They're managed by the guy from Tuff! Other than that, not really.

Playing The Last Vegas (from Chicago)'s 2004 sleaze-glam Lick 'Em And Leave 'Em (on Get Hip, same label as the Gore Gore Girls) now, and it sounds way better. Rawer, more ominous, kicks more ass when it decides to. The slower grinds remind me what pre-grunge Seattle bands like Green River were doing with half-remembered Aerosmith "Seasons Of Wither" riffs in the mid '80s (and the blurry hairy CD cover photo with eyes hiding behind sunglasses suggests that may be what Last Vegas had in mind), only with more mid '80s L.A. hairspray. Last Vegas got more slicked up and half-coherent on last year's Whatever Gets You Off, which came out on Nikki Sixx's label Eleven Seven and which I overrated for a few months before they were gonna tour with Crue (still think it's not bad), but the debut sounds grimier and rocks me more when it speeds up, e.g. in "One To Go" and "Hit The Bricks." Honestly figured I'd gotten rid of it; glad I found it in a box in the closet.

Also, that debut admittedly does sound recorded at the bottom of a slopbucket, which usually makes me push reject these days (and I'm not claiming you can hear the songs that well to be honest.) But it reminds me why I used to think that kind of schtick was cool, once upon a time.

I just got the re-release of the Armegeddon album with Keith Relf, Bobby Caldwell etc. A lot of the same "motifs" from Captain Beyond pop up here, which leads me to believe Caldwell was the true leader of both bands. Plus, the motherfucker was a genius drummer, just amazing. I dont know which record gets the nod from me, the CB debut or this. I think he had better players around him in Armageddon, but Captain Beyond is just so weird (in a good way). This is certainly heavier, and "Silver Tightrope" is a pretty killer ballad. Curious what you guys think.

Scott's raved about that Armageddon album on many an occasion. I think it's pretty good but a bit long-winded. (I too prefer Captain Beyond.)

The songs on Armageddon are long, but they dont bore me for some reason.

the first side is perfect, so just play that, myonga!

oh and i forgot to thank you for the cdr, myonga! thanks!

and, bill, if you want to pay tribute to bobby, by all means, add kind words to the tribute thread:

Where Is The Love For Bobby Caldwell?? No, Not THAT Bobby Caldwell! Bobby Caldwell of Captain Beyond & Keith Relf's Armageddon & Johnny Winter And & Rick Derringer Fame!!

Yeah, that thread is fantastic, kind of a "This Is Your Life" vibe.

xxpost - You're welcome, Scott; and sticking to Side One of "Armageddon" is exactly what I do!

Also, can I just say (without fake modesty) that my second remark on that Bobby Caldwell thread is possibly my alltime favourite of my own postings?

Interesting that you dont like side 2, the last song is the most "Captain Beyondish" song on it.

I am not Bobby Caldwell.

Re xhuxk's thing in the Voice, excerpted. A bit off topic but this is my territory, the demographics of which have something to do with which he speaks:

The indie domination at the top of the album list is a harder nut to crack, but a few factors seem worth pondering. For one thing, the poll's electorate has changed—freelance dollars aren't flowing like the old days, and with dailies and weeklies chopping arts positions, newsprint dinosaurs have departed the vocation, voluntarily and involuntarily, in droves. Meanwhile, way younger bloggers and Tweeters who make even less money reviewing music have stepped in. Some vote, and plenty see eye-to-eye with Pitchfork ... But when it's mainly the old farts who seem to have minds of their own, I start to wonder.

Actually, saw this coming years ago. Krugman, with reference to the economy, calls it looking for people who aren't part of the Borg collective.

I dropped out of the Poll two or three years ago, no longer keep track. Didn't look at the list this year except for your essay which was noted elsewhere and which caught my eye.

When McD presented his statistical analyses of critic non-congruence, I was always in the bottom five, reliably the total outlier. But there were others, I don't recall them all, but I'd reckon there's been a certain amount of loss for the same reasons -- their are some who are no longer interested in what it has to say. And while it was novel to be a statistical anomaly, the thrill of it's purely transient. I don't actually need a regular statistical proof that I've not been susceptible to groupthink.

It may be partly generational and age-related. But part of it is also not wishing to be part of a large stupid club to which your contribution is less than marginal.

After 2006, the Voice scrubbed itself of all the editors I'd worked with. In the space of over half a decade I'd written, at one time or another, something for every section except astrology and sex, including a cover story.

But it simply became too hard to pitch things to a different group with which I have nothing in common. We might as well be living on different planets and while that's not the case, it is part of the larger phenomenon in which stratification and people walling themselves off in their own areas of mutual interest is now the norm, one which is actually made easy to do through digitial communication/niche community. It's just the way things are so there mut be a certain percentage of people who choose not to participate or become invisible for similar reasons, not necessarily related to the Voice, but certainly related to their experience with music journalism and pop pro-rating.

I don't feel it's a duty to make an effort to break through such things anymore. If one were ostensibly running something like P&J, one would theoretically think such a person would be more interested in doing that. But with the numbers still involved, and there's never a shortage of actual digitally-conveyed input, what's the motivation to do so?

One thing I do know from being in cyberspace full-time for a couple decades is that crowds of the like-minded appreciate themselves more when they're less diverse and if you want lots of eyeballs and comments, you pitch to that if you want the best results. Pandering, but it is the most successful formula.

Anyway, while it's stupid to think that more than a couple people who read and regularly post in this thread contribute to P&J now, it's equally stupid to think that those who post here don't listen to anything new outside of hard rock reissues oldies they've dug out of their closets, f'r instance.

Note: Since this has to do with my own private Idaho, don't cut-n-paste it into the P&J discussion.

this is the first year i submitted a ballot since chuck left. my avant/noise/whatever column in decibel mag enabled me to hear all kinds of strange sounds that i dug a lot and i celebrated the best of them. and there were more where they came from. my column has totally reinvigorated me as far as writing about records goes. so, cuzza what i was listening to this year, i ended up in the bottom ten of voters. happy to be there! but not inordinately happy or anything. i wish more people heard the stuff i heard this year. a lot of it was very exciting.

I wound up down at the bottom by submitting an all-Latin ballot, a few of the albums on which probably sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Just not in America, and not to the online critical community. Not a lot of Los Tigres del Norte fans at Pitchfork, I bet.

Picked up Ten Years After's Roadwork from 2005, a double. It fell on the heels of Now which I thought was a good album sans Alvin Lee and it contains many of the songs from it performed live. They benefit from being played a lot by the time this was put out. Joe Gooch can do all Alvin Lee's parts, so the half of the thing that's classic live TYA is spotless. I'd say "I Can't Keep from Crying Sometimes" which was 14 minutes on the TYA's live one on Epic in the early 70's is still 14 minutes but is souped up by the addition of a medley that goes from the Yardbirds to Deep Purple before sequeing back into the slow jazz blues. "I'm Going Home" is crunching in all the right ways, plus "Hear Me Calling" is included.

Not quite was Foghat Live II was but in the same ballpark. Lots of yobbish soccer cheering from the crowd, so if it's not added on, there's some decent pub fighting audience for 'em in the UK still.

I recall Now, the studio album which came out the same year getting some good notice here. I still have it and crack it out now and then. It was way better than most of Alvin Lee's late stuff with TYA before they laid it to rest.

The Tubes' Mondo Birthmark was studio quality recording -- Wally Heider in SF -- before the debut album. It is, they say, all the stuff producer Al Kooper made a face at with the exceptions of earlier versions of "White Punks on Dope," "Mondo Bondage" and a couple from "Young & Rich". Now it doesn't
seem so outrageous but a spoken word thing about butt fucking set to a Capt. Beefheart disjoint must have seemed so, along with a song about Vietnam vets called "Empy Shoes." Waybill sings his shoes are empty because his legs have been blown off and his baby's left him. Could be ripe for a remake. Send it to Nashville right away.

Nice version of "Telstar" and the first version of "White Punks On Dope" rules just about as much as later versions with the slight diff of having the middle choruses singing "We're white dopes on junk/mom & day live in Hollywood/Hang myself when I get enough rope" rather than the straight title.

Lots of nifty pics and liner notes. This particularly reminds me of how some bands of people who were unreconstructed hippies gravitated to hard rock and elaborate arrangements -- some of this is arranged like the overture from Tommy, only fractured. Coincidentally, I was listening to the Pink Fairies' NeverNeverLand last night and there are similar roots, only the Tubes came from middle class Phoeniz, Arizona and were bigger snobs about being superlative on their instruments, Prairie Prince being one of the original members.

And that was release sometime last year on Fuel. I do recommend it if you're a Tubes fan, at least as far as the live album. Not so much if you like their "Talk to Ya Later" stuff.

So what happened with Wolfmother's Cosmic Egg. In the store yesterday, I noticed a surplus of copies being a bit of evidence of it the band laying a big one.

From four years ago, boiled down from the large enthusiasm from the press:

...The Austin-American Statesman, claims "These Australians play blistering, Afro-rockin' hard rock in the AC/DC tradition" and another, from Associated Press, compares them to the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream.

From the UK News of the World, a gig gets one star and the caption line: Dead Zep

The Aussie rockers have changed their line-up in recent years.

Frontman Andrew Stockdale is the only original member left, having sacked his two bandmates between their debut album and laughably-titled new record Cosmic Egg.

It's had little effect on their search for an original idea. That is, if they're even bothering to look.

Why waste time and effort on creativity, when it's much easier to photocopy the riffs, lyrical themes, haircuts, jewellery, trousers and chest hair of Led Zeppelin and their ilk instead?

As this rapturously received gig proves, as long as greasy men still live with their mothers and denim jackets are seen as a viable style choice, there'll always be a market for derivative Guitar Hero knock-offs such as Woman and Vagabond.

Depressing beyond belief.

Fickle, fickle, fickle.

These were coverage of a gig in Manchester and this notice is more favorable:

... This uncertain demeanour seems completely at odds with Wolfmother’s music. To the uninitiated, Wolfmother are about as subtle as a brick in the face. This is not a criticism; the noughties will most definitely not be remembered as a fruitful period for the guitar solo. Instead, this century has been defined by bands that would rather choke on their skinny jeans than ever dream of turning their amplifiers up to eleven. Wolfmother have defiantly stood against this trend. They have succeeded by playing riff-heavy, hard-rocking songs which grab you by the neck and rattle your boots. By virtue of their willful idiosyncrasy, Wolfmother have become unbelievably popular in the UK. How many other bands that released their debut album in 2005 are still packing out venues of this size? Not many is the answer. By embracing a supposedly moribund genre of music, Wolfmother have struck gold. So with all this success, why does Stockdale seem so tense? It’s probably due to the fact that tonight we are watching one of the first shows undertaken by Wolfmother v2.0.

Following the acrimonious departures of founding members Chris Ross and Myles Heskett last year, Stockdale is now the band’s sole surviving original member. Added to the generally unfavourable reviews that greeted Wolfmother’s most recent album, Cosmic Egg, the reason for Stockdale’s apparent nerves become clear: there's a lot riding on this tour. The Academy crowd obviously don’t care for such petty band politics, remaining buoyant throughout the show, roaring their approval for every song the band play. The band's new members don't seem to share Stockdale’s nerves, delivering a flawless, if mildly clinical performance

Musically, Wolfmother are hardly original. Their influences are not so much predictable as achingly obvious; just name any band that once headlined the old Donington Monsters of Rock festival. Wolfmother are no pastiche however, bringing their own 21st century twist to some well-worn riffs. The hard rock genre may be easy to mock, but it’s a damn hard thing to do well. Wolfmother have the talent not only to do it well, but to thrill their audience at the same time. If they manage to continue playing gigs of this scale, Stockdale will have nothing to worry about.

The same thing could be said of blues or country acts.

Why waste time and effort on creativity, when it's much easier to photocopy the riffs, lyrical themes, haircuts, jewellery, trousers and hats of Muddy Waters and his ilk instead?

Why waste time and effort on creativity, when it's much easier to photocopy the riffs, lyrical themes, haircuts, jewellery, trousers and hats of Hank Williams and his ilk instead?

The second Wolfmother album is decent. But I liked the debut.

The Runaways movie, early reviews. Hollywood Reporter gives it a good review. Salt Lake
pub emits a few haw-worthy although obvious putdowns in a review that's grudgingly positive. You haveta read the whole thing to get the idea he enjoyed it, working under the idea that anything retro or semi-historical is unworhty in some way because teenagers will not like it for multiple sins associated with being quaint.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/the-runaways-film-review-1004061594.story

http://www.saltlakemagazine.com/Blogs/Sundancing/January-2010/Sundance-Film-Review-The-Runaways/

The built-in audience would be: Pervy oldish men who like watching 16-year-olds kick out the jams in their undies. You know, the creepy guy who stares at you a little too long in line for the Port-A-Potties at Coachella. The dudes in the airport 20-years-too-old for that designer T trying to lure bright young things into the Fox Sports bar for a Midori sour. The Generation Which Refuses to Grow Old who collectively careen towards middle age Tweeting and Facebooking their way back to adolescence.

Whereas teens, you know, the ones who buy movie tickets and T-shirts and jewelry from Claire's – can't be bothered with your nostalgia. They don't care. Give 'em sparkly vampires and a gimlet-eyed country-pop star who spits saccharine sweet nothings about boys who go for the cheerleader instead and they'll come charging.

Playing music in a garage? Staying in crappy hotels? Calling from a payphone? Cramming in a sweaty station wagon? Feathering your hair? DIY shirts? Thrift store shopping?

Very quaint mom and dad. But sounds like so much work.

Even as Fanning turns in the most honest portrayal of a teen by a teen since Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy in Fast Times and Stewart's Jett, if for a moment, erases the bile of Bella from the viewer conscious collective — the young ones will stay away from The Runaways for the same reason they look at you funny when you blast The Clash while cleaning the house on a Sunday morning.

The Wrestler suffered from the same -- calling from payphones, staying in crappy places, being in a sweaty van, feathered hair, thrift store shopping.

More reviews, pinched off WSJ, one of the oddest places to find any interest in such a thing:

[i]“Coming-of-age movies are Sundance’s stock in trade, but few announce themselves as boldly, and broadly, as “The Runaways,” whose first shot is a splotch of menstrual blood hitting the pavement. Said splotch emanates from Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), a suburban California teenager with a burgeoning David Bowie obsession and a surly sensuality just beginning to bloom….But in spite of that opening drop, the movie’s evocation of the Runaways’ rise and fall is short on the juices that make for great, trashy, disreputable rock. [Director Floria Sigismondi] crams Fanning into Currie’s famous corset, and stages a passionate kiss between Currie and Jett before compressing their romantic relationship into a single softcore montage, but the movie is too tasteful and glossy to thoroughly embody the Runaways’ quasi-pedophiliac appeal.” [Sam Adams, IFC.com]

“When it gets away from the stage, however, and from the iconography of strutting she-devil-in-lingerie empowerment, The Runaways is just a watchable, rather so-so rock biopic, with the thinly imagined characters and desultory, one-thing-after-another episodic slackness of a TV movie. Granted, there’s a special challenge in bringing this story to life: The Runaways were really just little girls who fed themselves into a giant, buzz-saw machine of image and marketing, all ruled over, of course, by Fowley, the gonzo manager-producer from hell. So they’re really passive vessels in their own story. But The Runaways turns them passive in a different way: They’re made so likable and innocent and quaintly brash that they don’t fully have egos, erotic or otherwise.” [Owen Gleiberman, EW]

“‘The Runaways’ bursts with energy, youth, excess, female empowerment, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s an instant hit worldwide with its cast of young stars, but is it any good? Surprisingly, yes. It just must be met on its own terms… Maybe the film falls into the category of Guilty Pleasures. The dark ugliness on display — the amazing drug abuse and pre-AIDS hedonism — looks probably too exciting. While the film makes it clear its personalities suffered tremendously for their addictions, it all looks so glam.” [Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter]

“The movie’s all about the descent into booze and drugs of lead singer Cherie Curry, played as well as she can (given the awful script) by Dakota Fanning as a frail child who’d rather be singing Peggy Lee and Don MacLean. Short on character (Michael Shannon is amusingly ludicrous as the band’s abusive but image-savvy manager) and long on attitude, The Runaways plays like the sloppily entertaining stretched-out music video it is.” [Ella Taylor, NPR]

“All-girl teenage band ‘The Runaways,’ once regarded as a prefab joke but now lionized as trailblazers, are the subject of Floria Sigismondi’s first feature. Despite the helmer’s multidisciplinary background, this proves a conventionally enjoyable making-and-breaking-of-the-band saga… Though sometimes her usual neurotic tics distract, “Twilight’s” Stewart is a good fit for the tough but good-natured Jett, who carried on as frontwoman after Currie left, then launched a far more successful solo career. In line with many previous roles, Fanning emphasizes Currie’s vulnerability — making her a sexy nice-girl victim — though the bratty, dangerously needy character seen in old clips, discussed by bandmates in “Edgeplay,” and even glimpsed in Currie’s own book, seems more interesting.” [Dennis Harvey, Variety]

It's my book the Runaways records still don't sell much. I thought the first one was great when I
bought it in 1978 but it was never set to go far. A little less than half of it is fairly clumsy and one of favorite parts of it is "Dead End Justice" which has limited appeal if you don't like a bare parable about bad girls breaking out of juvie and one of 'em going down on the jailbreak. "Cherry Bomb," "American Nights," "You Drive Me Wild" and "Is It Day or Night" are the other good ones. They work off good riffs and they're so underproduced with big guitar they have a brutality that wasn't on a lot of hard rock records that year, boys vs. girls being irrelevant.

However, the subsequent records were mediocre to turdly except for the live album recorded after they broke up and never released in this country. Done in Japan, where they -- like Cheap Trick -- were
drawing big screaming audiences of children (but everyone did, I think, UFO I was big in Japan), it was substantially stepped on back in the studio. So it sounds really good, the cover is now great dirty old man stuff (it wasn't in -- what '80?) and it fills out to a record of their best material. One can like it as much, maybe more, than the debut.

So why would someone at NPR like anything about The Runaways movie? Any assertions that such a person would like the music or even the Runaways have to be frank lies because the records were never popular and certainly not with the class that pays attention to things like NPR.

And to say the movie bursts with 'female empowerment,' ala the Hollywood Reporter is unusual. The Runaways did not do empowerment on their first album, they did raw rock 'n' roll and their pictures didn't look so hot, even though they were supposed to. And Cherie Curie's biography was not empowering. I had a copy, reviewed it for the newspaper. It was a horror story -- mostly -- with no happy ending and it would have needed, and probably received, something of a face lift for a movie.

I think empowerment came along around the time Joan Jett hit all over the world with "I Love Rock 'n' Roll."

Anyway you slice it, this bit on YouTube from Japan is not empowering. It is a spectacle and the more one watches it the more embarrassing and sweat-inducing it becomes. It was thought to be a good Kim Folwey idea at the time. There certainly had to have been a better way to do things, somewhere much better than Fanny but not quite like this.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Cherie+Currie+Runaways+Cherry+Bomb

they will be immortal if only for cherry bomb alone. as far as npr goes, 70's nostalgia always goes far there. or anywhere. i doubt this movie will be anywhere near as good as the immortal Foxes.

come to think of it, the Foxes soundtrack probably beats most things too. moroder and angel! and bob seger and , um, janis ian! and boston! and donna summer!

glossy to thoroughly embody the Runaways’ quasi-pedophiliac appeal

Their small audience, what there was of it from being in Circus and Crawdaddy, was not obviously afflicted with pedophilia. I'd bet that Dave Marsh's style would have been to tell you the Runaways were for pedophiles, though.

I think pedophiles had their own special mags and the Runaways weren't in them?

I was actually interested in seeing the movie but I may now have to tell everyone I didn't and go in a pulled-down hat and black macintosh.

As for Foxes, yeah Skot, the same thing occured to me. The Runaways without the music and Scott Baio as someone the problem of being to young-looking to get any action.

I've always assumed the Runaways' audience was mostly teenagers, more or less the same age as the Runaways. (Lita Ford born '59; Joan Jett born '60, just like me. Though to be honest my main exposure to them at the time was probably watching the forgotten late '70s TV celebrity fake-sports/obstacle-course competition Almost Anything Goes. I swear I saw them on there once, though when I was hunting around the Internet for evidence of their appearance a couple weeks ago, I found nothing. Could barely find anything about the show itself, actually.)

Did "Cherry Bomb" actually get any rock radio play at the time? Sure don't remember hearing it in Detroit; I'd figure it would have been considered way too punk rock in 1976. Debut album only reached #194 in Billboard; '77 followup, Queens Of Noise, only got to #172.

The Joan Jett wikipedia page says 9-22-58, a month or so after mine. (Madonna anticipates me by 10 days; Michael Jackson trails me by three.) Anyway, I do remember hearing Cherry Bomb on the radio then, but it didn't get heavy play. I guess that would have been WPLJ or more likely WNEW. Saw them as a late teen, in their post-Cherie days, wedged between Suicide & the Ramones. I probably knew about them more from their press than their radio play. Hmm, now I wonder who was in that Joan-led version of the band.

Hmmm.. I didn't check Wiki; Joel Whitburn has 9-22-60 in Philadelphia. But maybe she's older than she used to be!

Did "Cherry Bomb" actually get any rock radio play at the time?

I think Cherry Bomb might have actually had more play a few years later when JJ re-recorded it for Glorious Results of... album.

Late period Runaways was probably Joan Jett, Sandy West, Lita Ford and rotating bass players, either Vickie Blue or Laurie McAllister, not that it mattered much.

There was an old poster that hung in one of the record stores in Pasadena, maybe from the Roxy, advertising a bill of the Runaways and Van Halen. Probably dated from around '78.

Post Runaways no one had an easy time of it. Cherie Currie made two albums, one of which was with her twin sister. There's some awful cheesy video from that time on YouTube. Her backing band for the album was Toto before it was Toto I think. The second one might be more listenable than the first.

Lita Ford's first hard rock solo album had Neal Merryweather in the band, if my memories still good on it. Or maybe he just produced it.

Joan Jett floundered for awhile, no label would take a chance on her. She'd recorded an album with a rolling cast that would become Bad Reputation and she and her producer eventually put it out themselves. And it still wasn't particularly popular although a lot of the songs on it are now so.

It was the second album, I Love Rock 'n' Roll that changed everything.

I"m going to correct that about Bad Reputation being not so popular. Now it occurs to me that it was toured heavy and that it eventually took hold in surprising numbers, setting the stage for the second.

Was actually thinking you were right in the first place, George, but it turns out that Bad Reputation got up to #51 in Billboard -- not near the second LP's #2 (with #1 and #7 singles), but not bad. Thing is, I'm wondering when the debut peaked since, according to Whitburn, its single "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" didn't chart until July '82, after the two I Love Rock N Roll hits had already charted. Supppsedly Bad Reputation debuted on the LP chart in March '81, nine months before the followup, and stayed on the chart for 21 weeks, but I'm wondering whether it may have fallen off, and then re-entered with its single. Wasn't it actually re-released at one point, first out on Blackheart Records and then later on Boardwalk?

Anyway. How come I never noticed before that Eddie And The Hot Rods covered Crack The Sky's "We Want Mine" on Fish 'N' Chips from 1980 before? Real good version, too; maybe the best track on the album. Best (also most Who-like) original is "This Is Today," where they say don't worry about all those young blokes fighting out on the street, they're just having some fun and all, and don't you remember when we used to do that too when we were their age? Which is interesting because it's done from the point of view of somebody older (not to mention possibly apologizing for skinheads beating up Pakistanis, this being 1980 in England and all), but that's the way it goes. Also get the idea that the sort-of-spoken Cockney-accent "Fish N Chips Pts 1 and 2" at LP's beginning and end might be another bid for the oi! boys (unless oi! boys didn't happen until '81 -- don't have a history book handy); wasn't aware fish and chips are a U.K. Friday specialty til now. (Thought that only happened with pre-Vatican II Catholics, and with us it was fish sticks.) "Call It Quits" is another good original rocker, and they cover the Rascals' "You Better Run" (also done by Pat Benatar the same year) and Outsiders' "Time Won't Let Me" well. Al Kooper produces and plays "additional keyboards and guitars."

Also discovered that "Dance Republic" on Joe "King" Carrasco & the Crowns' 1983 Party Weekend LP has basically the same rhythm as Ace Frehley's "New York Groove" (and Bohnannon's "Disco Stomp" - see Stairway disco-metal appendix), which makes me wonder whether the beat might've first come from Mexico. Album also contains enjoyably blatant rips of the Ramones, McCoys, Chuck Berry, ? and the Mysterians, and according to my wife, possibly "Summer Nights" from Grease.

Supppsedly Bad Reputation debuted on the LP chart in March '81, nine months before the followup, and stayed on the chart for 21 weeks, but I'm wondering whether it may have fallen off, and then re-entered with its single. Wasn't it actually re-released at one point, first out on Blackheart Records and then later on Boardwalk?

Yeah, it was re-released. I think this one was a surprising example of word-of-mouth and a buzz combined with touring taking hold. Plus it probably benefited from being the first actually good album from a former member of the Runaways. Lita Ford might have been out of the gate first, I don't recall the years of her first two metal albums, but the first one wasn't any good at all and the second, while an improvement, was a hard rock/HM album with no really catchy tunes.

Btw, not trying to imply that Eddie + Hot Rods actually say anything specific about skinheads or Paki-bashing (or that all skinheads were Paki-bashers, either -- most of them were more likely just drunken football holligans); for all I know, they'd written that song a few years before, and it was just about the original punk rockers, who come to think of it these guys may have felt like big brothers to in the first place. Just imagining what it might have meant amid the turmoil of 1980 U.K. (which I don't know as much about as I might pretend to, actually.) Also don't want to imply that album's as good as their first couple (Teenage Depression, which I still have, and Life On The Line, which I don't anymore for some reason. Have never heard 1979's Thriller (!!??); wasn't even aware of it 'til yesterday.

Also didn't want to imply that that Carrasco album I mentioned was particularly "hard rock"; that band can rock'n'roll, in the '50s Texas border sense obviously, but it's not like their guitars ever get very loud. Just wanted to mention it here because of the "New York Groove" connection. And I'm also pretty sure Carrasco's first two albums were better -- the self-titled Crowns one from 1980 definitely, and the one with El Molino from 1978 inasmuch as a I remember it. Think I'd take Party Weekend over '82's slicker and not-Tex-Mex enough Synapse Gap, which had Michael Jackson on it, though. But this is way off topic by now, so I'll shut up. (Curious whether anybody ever really has worked those kind of Tex-Mexy rhythms into a hard rock context, though. Maybe some Mexican bands I included in Stairway's second edition come close, but Carrasco's band had more bounce than most of those.)

No border rhythms I can detect on Cruzados' After Dark from 1987, their second album, which I bought for 50 cents a few weeks ago. Which seems a little odd to me, given their L.A. Chicano pedigree and the fact that, as the Plugz, they (most of them anyway) had covered "La Bamba" a few years before, which is to say a few years before Los Lobos. (I also call the Plugz' cuts on the Repo Man soundtrack a "hokey barrio move" in Stairway, but I don't have that LP around here anymore to figure out what I meant by that.) Anyway, Cruzados' LP is just straight-down-the-line no-personality post-Springsteen commercial lower-middle-class-struggle medium-hard rock, more or less the same density as what Bryan Adams or Bon Jovi were doing at the time, just without tunes as good. After listening to that Red Rockers LP with "China" on it last year, I'm getting the idea this was a route the industry hoped might work for seasoned hardcore bands; not sure it did work for any, though. Pretty sure I've read that "Bed Of Lies" was the Cruzados' rock radio track at the time, but it didn't chart Hot 100 (they never did -- LPs peaked at #76 and #106), and like "China" I sure never heard it on the radio myself. Album's not too bad, though -- "Last Ride" probably kicks hardest, "Young And On Fire" an okay generic hot child in the city number, "Small Town Love" okay generic fake Mellencamp I guess, "Summer's Come, Summer's Gone" bittersweet and hopeful. Truth is, probably even John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown (who actually had a song called "Tex Mex - Crystal Blue"!) had more captivating songwriting. Song credits here mostly go to band members, but producers are definitely familiar L.A. studio Mafia names (Waddy Wachtel, Billy Steinberg, etc.) Whitburn book says that Marshall Rohner, the guitar player, went on to play in T.S.O.L. in 1989.

Actually hearing more Mexican pop music mixed into Chris Perez Band's Resurrection, a pretty decent Chris Lord-Alge-mixed bilingual commercial 1999 hard rock album on Hollywood Records from a trio led by Selena's widower. But the rhythms are too up-to-date to be "Tex-Mex"; more tejano, I guess, plus corazone ballads. (Phil, who keeps up with Latin music way more than I have for the past decade and a half, could probably talk more coherently about specifics.) Anyway, the guitarist works in Who powerchords sometimes, and they cover Love's "Alone Again Or" in both English and Spanish, and the rock sound in general sounds up-to-date without being at all grunge. 15 songs (high-CD-era length) is too many, but I've let it play through twice this week painlessly. Good melodies and singing throughout. Guessing there might also be late '90s/'00s Christian rock albums this good, but I don't know what.

I remember hearing a single from that Chris Perez disc but I have no memory now of what it sounded like. My best guess, based on his contributions to Selena's work, is that it was probably an ultra-conventional power ballad (his guitar solos on her tracks, when they got in there at all, were always really incongruous, like when one would get pasted into the middle of a Whitney Houston song or something).

Re Joan Jett, after "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" took off, a video for "Do You Wanna Touch Me" (another cover, btw - it's a Gary Glitter song) was shot, featuring Joan in a bikini in an attempt to de-snarling-punk-rock-dyke her image and it kinda worked. I remember seeing it on MTV a bunch in the early to mid 80s.

I've been trying to track down Cruzados stuff on download blogs off and on for a while, but neither of their albums seem to turn up. After reading your description, I'm no longer much interested, despite the fact that I think the Plugz' Electrify Me is the greatest punk album to ever come out of L.A., and that they should be worshipped like gods in the Latin rock community but really aren't - I'd kinda posit Tito Larriva as the Latin equivalent to Scott "Wino" Weinrich: a total lifer with a devoted cult but who's never managed to break through, despite occasional nods from major labels.

On a more current topic, is anybody making more entertaining hard rock/ metal videos than White Wizzard these days? I doubt it. Their new one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfnIBnz2_zw

OK, dredged up the Cruzados' debut, tried to listen, but couldn't make it past the huge '80s drums.

Phil, to what extent did the Plugz draw on Mexican-American music? At all? (Not saying they should or shouldn't have; just curious about it.)

Found the Pontiac Brothers' Johnson for $1 last month -- what passed for a college-radio hard rock band in 1988, on rootsy college-rock label Frontier. Definitely more Stones-boogie to them than to the Replacements (especially in opener and by far best cut "Ain't What I Call Home," which rocks as hard as a lot of good '80s Mellencamp, maybe in "American Dream" and "Real Job" too), but I don't think they ever get to the level of, say, Rock City Angels or Faster Pussycat (much less Guns N Roses, who were already hitting by the time this came out.) Maybe Georgia Satellites now and then, or at least (in "Drop Of The Hat") Jason and the Scorchers. Wimpiest-sounding and most (post-Stink) Replacements-like cut, "Creep," is also the only one sung by the guitarist, Ward Dotson, who oddly enough used to be in the Gun Club. But the main singer, Matt Simon, still doesn't manage character to have cut in sleaze-metal L.A. at the time, and the rhythm section would be too stiff too. Ian McLagan's piano (doesn't say on which cuts) seems to help when it shows up, though. And the words hardly ever stick for more than a line at a time -- mostly girlfriend anxiety stuff, near as I can tell -- not even on a preening Westerberg level. The sound gets more muffled when it gets louder on Side Two, so maybe they were trying to do an Exile thing there, hard to tell. Christgau gave both this album and a previous one B+'s, which seems about right. (Pretty sure I Rock-a-Rama'd one of their LPs in Creem, maybe even this one.)

Uh, guess part of what I'm saying about them vs. the L.A. sleaze-glam stuff is that bands like Rock City Angels and (especially second album) Faster Pussycat, while also clearly Stones-infused, just had way more looseness and open-endedness to their arrangements, and dance groove to their rock; they didn't seem so reined in. Maybe also helped that those bands wanted to come off as rock stars, not just regular guys (though it's interesting that coming off as just regular guys didn't seem to hurt '70s bands like Earth Quake and Brownsville Station near so much.)

Phil, to what extent did the Plugz draw on Mexican-American music? At all?

Yeah, a lot. The original lineup was two Mexicans and a white bassist, and on their first album they noticed/figured out that hardcore and Tejano/norteño music have the exact same up-and-down rhythm, so they've got a great Latin-punk groove. Plus they covered "La Bamba" in like 90 seconds with rewritten punk-rock lyrics. On the second album, they brought in a saxophonist and went a little more Los Lobos-ish, except that it was released in 1981, and Los Lobos' first Slash record didn't come out until 1983. (They did an indie EP in 1978 that nobody outside of L.A. heard until it was reissued after they became critics' darlings.)

hardcore and Tejano/norteño music have the exact same up-and-down rhythm

Ha ha, pretty sure this is actually called "polka" (Poles and Germans having brought their accordions to Texas in the 19th Century, and the rest being the history.) But I get exactly what you're saying; thanks!

I'd kinda posit Tito Larriva as the Latin equivalent to Scott "Wino" Weinrich: a total lifer with a devoted cult but who's never managed to break through, despite occasional nods from major labels.

He's now indelibly in cine history, I think, for being the bandleader in the Tarantino vampire biker bar film, From Dusk Til Dawn.

I suppose the band was Tito & the Tarantulas and I recall them boosting an album to little success out here. But the movie's continued success in replay must be worth some royalties.

When I first got here long here I was initially surprised by how much the Mexican musicians in the restaurants were the same as the polka musicians in Pennsylvania. The Pennsy Germans and their gemutlichkeit thing is totally like Mexicano hospitality in soCal. And for well over a hundred years the big thing the dad would do would be to pass his accordion on to his son. Which sounds funny but these accordions were maximum things and expensive. It lost a lot of steam when Fender's electric guitars moved into the neighborhood.

Guitarist Dave Chandler, bassist Mark Adams, drummer Armando Acosta and
vocalist Scott Reagers crawled out of the industrial wasteland of Lomita,
CA, in 1979, playing dinosaur doom when L.A.¹s squalid underground was ruled
by the hardcore punk aesthetic of Black Flag. Vitus invoked the fuzzed-out,
drugged-out riff hypnosis of Sabbath at a time when their musical mentors in
the Drab Four were at their pre-Dio nadir.

All through the ¹80s, they wrote torpid doom epics while speed metal
exploded across L.A. County in the form of Metallica, Slayer and Dark Angel.
They were bellbottomed longhairs playing bleary-eyed dirge metal on an SST
roster that had built its punk-as-fuck reputation with Black Flag, Minutemen
and weirdo rock bands like Saccharine Trust and the Meat Puppets. Thrust
into a scene they had hardly anything in common with, Vitus spent most of
their career getting spit on while touring with the likes of Flag, the
Mentors and the Brood.

After recording two full-lengths (1984¹s Saint Vitus and 1985¹s Hallow¹s
Victim) and an EP (1985¹s The Walking Dead) with Vitus, Reagers split
mid-tour, within days of finding his own replacement in burgeoning DC
death-glam iconoclast Scott ³Wino² Weinrich. In 1986, the new Vitus lineup
recorded their six-song masterpiece, Born Too Late, with producer Joe
Carducci at Total Access Studios in Redondo Beach, CA. Released the
following year, the album was an unmitigated triumph of autobiographical
heaviness. Chandler¹s lyrics about alcoholism (³Dying Inside²), acid trips
(³Clear Windowpane²) and depression (³The Lost Feeling²) were trumped only
by those of the title track, which perfectly articulated Saint Vitus¹
acrimonious relationship with the rest of the world. And yet 23 years later,
Vitus have been embraced by metalheads everywhere, and Born Too Late is a
stone-cold classic. Here¹s how it went down.

Came in my mailbox today in promo for Born Too Late. I still like the Saint Vitus debut a lot. "Burial at Sea" and "The Psychopath" -- I put it on last week and it has a very faded distant quality, with the guitarist really working the wah. Every guitar line has a cocked wah tone, complimenting the dolorous vocals.

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2010/01/gone-home-ten-years-later-really-no-one.html

The White Wizzard video deserves applause. It's totally not fair that it is doomed to only be enjoyed in ghettos like ours. Singer has best teeth and racy metal ready blue ski jacket combo in rock 'n' roll.

And judging by the video posted in last year's thread, they're upping their game too.

Yeah, the video is really excellent. And I totally agree with the band - the soprano sax truly is the most evil sound on earth.

Guessing -- judging from their opening spot on the Lady Gaga tour, and a stupid "night on the town with" piece in this morning's NY Times style section that mentioned they've got a major label coming out -- Semi-Precious Weapons are going to be the next glam-rock band to get some label push. Possible they've improved over the past two years, but here's what I wrote on Rhapsody about an earlier album by them, and they'd have to improve a whole lot for me to wind up giving a shit:

Semi Precious Weapons, We Love You (Razor & Tie): Just because their album cover looks colorfully flamboyant and the record is "produced by the legendary Tony Visconti (T. Rex, David Bowie, Morrissey)" (as the press bio puts it), doesn't mean that these NYC glam phonies don't play Brit-poppish wimp-rock for sad children. Which they sure seem to.

Cosloy-curated Matador Record punk compilation of local Austin mostly punk bands called Casual Victim Pile getting tons of press here; obviously not expecting to like much of it, but I emailed the label asking for a copy, and haven't heard back so maybe I'm persona non grata there. I did kind of like the album by one of the bands, the Golden Boys, that I heard a couple years ago though (Scorpion Stomp #2 on Hook Or Crook, sort of backwoods swamp goth blues thing a la Birthday Party or the Scientists.) Apparently some of the other bands are teen hardcore, and one of the ones with girls gets compared to Joan Jett and the Pretenders, something I would have to hear to believe. If anybody here happens to hear it, though, please say what you think.

Another one of the bands, Strange Boys, have been getting lots of hype in the past couple years as garage rock saviors, but judging from the two albums I've heard (last year's and this year's) they don't rock at all; just sound lazy and hazy and really low energy -- just more indie slackers. I don't get it. Though their new album (due out in late Feb) does have one song, "Da Da," where they seem to steal half the drunken tune, but none of the drunken rock, from "All Night Long" by Joe Walsh.

But truth is (what everybody reading this thread is already thinking), why am I even bothering with all that nerd-rock crap when there's a new Ratt album coming out? (Playing in the background now; sounds okay! -- Pearcy says they wanted to make it sound like it could have been the followup to Out Of The Cellar, and so far it kind of does!)

Best news I've heard all day! The last Dokken album sounded musically in line with Under Lock and Key and Back for the Attack, except Don can't really hit all the notes he used to hit and his voice just generally sounds beat. How does Pearcy's voice sound now?

Not bad! At least so far. I mean, his echo-screeching actually sounded kinda strained to me way back in 1984, but so far I'm impressed by the extent that his high register hasn't deteriorated since then. And the band doesn't seem to be dragging its feet, either! There are at least a couple songs that seem as fast as anything they did in the '80s. (But this is just my first time through; don't quote me. Album is called Infestation, btw, due out on Roadrunner toward the end of April.)

I had some good things to say about Pearcy's last solo album in 2008. I'm kinda looking forward to the new Ratt disc, as long as it sounds more like their earlier stuff than their latter-day stuff.

Earlier stuff, no question. (Wish I still had my copy of their debut EP on Time Coast Records with "Walking The Dog" on it, btw; how much is that worth these days?) Playing the new Airbourne now; maybe okay, maybe not, I'm not sure yet, but definitely nowhere near as good as the new Ratt (which comes out on the same day on the same record label.)

Finally caught up with Zalvation, the new Sensational Alex Harvey Band's record from 2006 without Alex, naturally. It's the originals plus a gamer who can't really pull off Alex's old Bertolt Brechtian/Kurt Weill naughty Euro-theatre and Cliff Richard impersonations. So it's really a Zal
Cleminson solo, or even more accurately, a reformulation of Tear Gas. Tear Gas was the pre-SAHBsters before Alex found 'em, with producer Davey Batchelor on vocals. One album, Piggy Go Better was not good, another s/t was a really good stab at ripping off Jeff Beck/Led Zep, much better than Leafhound, for example.

So Zalvation from 2006 redoes old SAHB numbers in the context of a straight hard rock/metal band which means it's Cleminson's show. First listen has it pretty good.

In Pennsy, all the bands influenced by the Dead End Kids did Alex Harvey and that eventually included Cinderella and Britny Fox and probably Poison when they were in Harrisburg. And Britny Fox finally committed to record the SAHB tune the Dead End Kids had been playing in bars from Reading to the Jersey shore for at least a decade, Midnight Moses. And that alone is worth the price of admission.

Cleminson ups the ante on it a little, supercharging the riff even a little more to make up for the lack of Alex. It doesn't really need an Alex Harvey to make it work though, any yob can carry off the vocal part since it's mostly just a semi-ontune stream of relation punctuated by shouts of "Hey! <pause> Hey! Hey! Hey!"

If you liked SAHB only because they were quaint you wouldn't like this so much because you only like the Alex Harvey part. If you liked them because of the Cleminson stuff, this is a go.

Angus Khan opened their album last year with a pretty deadly version of "Midnight Moses" too, I thought.

Best new Airbourne track so far: "It Ain't Over Til It's Over." Fast! (But seven songs in, and the first one not to make me impatient.)

Okay, liking "Steel Town" too. Aussies going for that blue-collar Pittsburgh AC/DC crowd. (Actually, there might be steel towns Down Under, too; I just don't know what they are.) Anyway, I should probably shut up about this record until I've played it through a couple times.

BTW, rather than post them all into this thread, select YouTubes:

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2010/01/sludge-in-70s-that-was-name-of-my.html

If you liked SAHB only because they were quaint you wouldn't like this so much because you only like the Alex Harvey part. If you liked them because of the Cleminson stuff, this is a go.

Never thought of SAHB as "quaint," but I must be in the former camp. Listened to most of the sound samples online and couldn't finish. Alex's yowl is sorely missed.

Like said, the Brecht/Weill drama through the Scotsman isn't there. It's Tear Gas doing SAHB
stories.

Metal Mike via email, fwiw; not sure what this is in reference to:

the third JPP album (on MCA) has zip, no good songs
but the 1st/2nd combined (with three lead singers total counting Joe) -- ALMOST total one great album (produced by jack douglas, both)
lead track East Coast, West Coast is particular balls out good sounding (on 2nd lp)
the imaginary Orange Bowl combined set (Joe Perry Project w/ace frehley on/off for his best songs) is nearly awesome

x-post: Kind of reminded me of when I saw The Tubes without Fee Waybill. They were actually still pretty good; the killer riffs were all intact, but the replacement vocalist just didn't have the necessary oomph (even though Fee was never really a good singer, he definitely had character.) I can see where the new SAHB might be really fun live.

That's a good comparison. "White Punks on Dope," "Mondo Bondage" are great tunes on vinyl with no
visuals. But Waybill executed them with his own vision. I'd just mentioned upstream the old pre-debut Tube album releases for the first time and there are some things which are mostly just Roger Steen adn the rest of the Tubes being musos and they're not the same thing as those with Waybill as
ringmaster.

George,

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Now playing: Barn Burners, Bangers. On Metal Blade for some reason, this is straight-up boogie metal from Canada, recommended to fans of Priestess, Saviours or even Early Man (but not as thrashy as the latter). They're probably closest in spirit and sound to Saviours - raw-throated vocals, ultra-primitive riffing, drums like cardboard boxes full of dirt. Dumb song titles ("Beer Today, Bong Tomorrow," "Brohemoth") and the rhythm section lets down the side from time to time, but there's some decent stuff on here. If this was the '70s these guys would be Point Blank, probably. But it's 2010 so they're not that bluesy, just pretending to be beer-sodden bikers.

I had a blast with Barnburners, personally. Your take is pretty on the mark, although I remember thinking there were some really catchy songs on the disc. Only listened to it through once, though, and that was in the background, so I don't have any specifics.

So what do you guys think of Priestess? The new CD (out this week) wasn't doing much for me, but then again I can't say I gave it much of a chance. My wife wound up liking it, though. Was I missing anything?

By the way, back in nerd-rock land, I've decided it's okay to mention this here now that Scott offically came out as a Vampire Weekend fan yesterday: Phil, you should know that one of my Rhapsody colleagues swears that their current single, "Cousins" (least twee thing on their new album) sounds like Plugz to him. I am not Plugz-cognizant enough to say one or the other. (It's basically a ska song, if that's any help.)

Also: decided the new Airbourne is basically ignorable, beyond a song or two. (Which might still be more than you could say for their debut.)

The new Airbourne is slightly better than their debut, but like you I find it totally ignorable/forgettable. I dig the new Priestess - I liked the first one, and this one does what that one did (combine stoner rock with early '80s metal a la Judas Priest or Accept) with slightly more compositional ambition. A few songs really get galloping, and there's an eight-minute epic right in the middle of the disc that's swell.

Hmmm...I should probably swipe Priestess back from my better half, when she's done with it. Which may be a while.

Now playing: Thundertrain, Teenage Suicide, CD reissue on Gulcher from a few years back. Sounds killer. Boston band, originally came out on Jelly Records in 1977. Contains the original hard-rock "Hot For Teacher." Popoff compared them to DMZ, Dictators, Kiss, Dolls (most of which I don't buy) and (my favorite comparison obviously) "early Kix (early like before the first album.)" (How would he know??) I'm thinking maybe closer to...TKO? Streetheart minus the new wave disco embellishments? Hounds? Somebody in that school. Though those might be more due to the singer's bratty snotty teen high register (a voice I love, which no hard rock band I can think of has used in ages.) Really, I hear more Alice than Dolls or Kiss in their sound. Apparently singer Mach Bell went on to sing on (Popoff's words) "Joe Perry's worst solo record," which Popovic seems to agree with Metal Mike was his third. Jasper and Oliver on Thundertrain: "Very punky, similar to Twisted Sister in image and songs." Someday I should read the CD liner notes.

was excited to get a decent u.s. vinyl copy of the second battered ornaments album yesterday.

http://www.popsike.com/The-Battered-Ornaments-MantlePiece-Mint-UK-Harvest-69/390018256591.html

this was pete brown's group before he got, um, kicked out of his own group. doesn't COMPLETELY belong here, as its more of an improv/jazz/prog/rock kinda thing, but there is genuine rocking courtesy of chris spedding. pete brown belongs here though cuz he co-wrote i fee free, white room, and sunshine of your love with jack bruce.

the band history is kinda funny/sad:

"Brown formed Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments in 1968 and in 1969 the band recorded two albums; A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark and Mantlepiece, with a line up including Pete Bailey (percussion), Charlie Hart (keyboards), Dick Heckstall Smith (sax), George Kahn (sax), Roger Potter (bass), Chris Spedding (guitar) and Rob Tait (drums). Brown then suffered the ignominy of being thrown out of his own band, the day before they were due to support The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park. Brown's vocals were then removed from Mantlepiece and re-recorded by Chris Spedding and the band renamed The Battered Ornaments."

oops:

http://www.popsike.com/pix/20090610/230348249702.jpg

also got a decent mono copy of The Hot Ones! by The Standells yesterday. that's their all-covers album. doing the hits of the day Standells-style. I needed that.

Thinking now that the best major label (or probably otherwise) sleaze/ glam album of the '00s (which I probably wrongly stated on last year's thread might be last year's Last Vegas album) might actually be the '01 self-titled debut by Beautiful Creatures, feat. ex-Bang Tango shrieker Joe LeSte' and sounding (in the background, as we speak) basically like a good Bang Tango album. (Not as good as Dancin' On Coals, but still good.) Only competition I can think of at the moment would be Silvertide's Show And Tell (BMG imprint J Records, 2004.)

finally listening to michael bolton's (a.k.a. michael bolotin) band blackjack. their 1979 album. not doing much for me. though definitely more listenable than regular michael bolton.

Now American Dog's Hard, from 2007. Way more melody and finesse and actual songfulness than I'd remembered, or than you'd expect from a biker band whose most memorable chorus goes "Sometimes you eat the pussy, sometimes the pussy eats you." Rocks a lot harder than Beautiful Creatures, too -- Or maybe than anybody else in the '00s; not sure who the competition would be off hand. (Actually, with respect to Phil, I'd hope this is what Point Blank would sound like if they came out right about now; really, it's not that much different from Point Blank in the first place. Pretty sure Jackyl, to name an obvious predecessor, didn't boogie this hard.) What's weird is I'm not compelled to go out and track down all the other American Dog CDs -- This is the only one I own, and somehow it feels like enough for them. How different can the other ones be? (George can answer that question, I guess.) Which must mean they're lacking something, if I don't care about owning their complete ouevre -- Guess it's not like most of their songs really stick with me when the album's over, maybe. But I don't mind that much.

Now Necros Tangled Up/Live Or Else CD reissue on Rykodisc, from 2005 (recorded between 1986 and 1990). Kinda surprised to be finding the live tracks (the last 14 out of 25, ending with a ragged but still reasonably righteous "Nugent Medley" that's got "Great White Buffalo," "Strangelhold," "Cat Scratch Fever") sounding so much deadlier than the studio ones. In fact, too much of the actual Tangled Up album, give or take the classic title-track single and the Pink Floyd cover "Nile Song" and maybe the demiclassical instrumental "House Full Of Drunks," seems caught in some awkward in-joke No Man's Land between hardcore and grunge. On Live Or Else they come off a lot more like a legit hard rock band, somehow. "Race Riot" sounds like a bunch of skinheads in the audience getting rowdy though. (I saw them live plenty of times in the mid/late '80s; also went to shows with Barry Hennsler, who moonlighted at Kinko's in Ann Arbor and whose favorite new bands in 1987 were Guns N' Roses and White Zombie. His liner notes, frequently concerning the idiocy of Megadeth and Overkill fans the Necros encountered when they toured together, are really funny -- may have been published in Motorbooty first.)

George can answer that question, I guess.) Which must mean they're lacking something, if I don't care about owning their complete ouevre -- Guess it's not like most of their songs really stick with me when the album's over, maybe. But I don't mind that much.

I have Hard and the four tunes on that biker rock sampler from a ways back. Had the debut but can't find it anymore so it probably went out in sale at Amoeba.

American Dog are like the perfect chili cheese dog of the genre. Once they or you get it right, it's hard to ever mess up again. And you always like it a lot but if you eat them every day it considerably diminishes the enjoyment and makes you unpopular with women. That said, while such records are consumables, they are not food and seem to be governed more by the economic law of diminishing marginal utility in which 'utility' is the same as satisfaction.

That is, every subsequent album after the one you enjoy the most, even if it is identical, or a little worse, or even a bit better, seems to yield less. So you probably only need one. Sort of. In hard rock this is pretty reliable because the genre bands don't do things like go from being a Cavern Club mod pop rock band to Sgt. Pepper anywhere in their career.

In the Seventies, marginal utility was overcome by hype and press accompanying new releases building up expectations more than you get today now that you are old and your brain pathways/taste buds have been
overexposed. In this I find I don't ever listen to all the old classic AC/DC albums. One from each singer does it, thank you, even though I have most of them. But I remember thinking differently at the time.

I don't know how you obviate it now.

Foghat the same way. Foghat Live and Foghat Live II or the live one last year from some blues rock house on Long Island. It's great, BTW, so if you see it used ...

Savoy Brown -- always come back to Live in Central Park. That was the apex for me even though the band which preceded it, with Chris Youlden and Foghat, made artistically better albums which were marginally better or just marginally worse. It all came together live for that recording and that's what Kim Simmonds company did best ever. By only a few increments. And I must have everything by SB except the last
two.

Speaking of genre bands and diminishing marginal utility, the vault reissues put out Detective doing a live show for the swells at Atlantic Studios, something which once only available as promo.

Detective being Michael des Barres doing Silverhead without the glam look and dirty lyrics about getting head and so on. Half of the first album was produced by Jimmy Page under a nom de plume and it has the MOST John Bonham-esque drum sound. Which makes a lot of it pretty bombastic. And it's carried over live on the songs from that album, notably their two best -- "Detective Man" and "Heartache" -- the latter of which is probably the best thing des Barres ever did. It wails. Detective also known for having Michael Monarch, the guitarist for Steppenwolf, before he disappeared from the industry.

Blackjack albums were pretty mediocre. The appropriately named imprint Lemon reissued them. The first was produced by Tom Dowd, which was a really bad choice. The second by Eddie Offord, kind of a bad choice but not quite as bad, and for different reasons. Michael Bolton fought to have these two records
suppressed.

Jonathan Hall from Backbiter (whose Time Again/Magnet Heart Suite hard rock CD from 2005 I liked when it came out and should dig out of the storage box again someday), answering Metal Mike via mass email (and mentioning a band I mentioned here yesterday):

I prefer the JPP version of Let The Music Do The Talkin’! Plus, Mach Bell from Thundertain “I gotta rock Steven, I gotta rock!!!” I recently got a USB turntable to start digitizing some of my vinyl. I did an awesome rip of Cactus – Restrictions. Great pressing, awesome Howlin’ Wolf cover of Evil. Also, ripped The Haunted lp with 125. Unfortunately, I’m finding that I partied a little too hard with most of my records with many skipping. Which sucks for The Moving Sidewalks, because they’re so hard to find on CD.

Now playing: The Replacements' Sorry Ma Forgot To Take Out The Trash, which, as years go on, I increasingly believe they never topped.

As for American Dog, George's chili cheese dog analogy makes perfect sense. (And I've still got their cuts on that Outlaw Raw Trax comp around here somewhere too. Which reminds me that one '00s album that might give them a run for their money, rocking-hard-wise, might be Billy Butcher's Penny Dreadful, also on Outlaw, from 2004).

Never heard those Blackjack albums myself, and now I'll avoid them even more. But still think Bolton's '83 debut solo 45 "Fools Game" was real good hard pop, in the manner of what Bryan Adams was doing around then.

Now the Left's Jesus Loves The Left: The Complete Studio Recordings CD comp on Bona Fide, from 2006. Great Hagerstown, MD (home of Kix) punk-rock band from the late '80s; a couple EPs by them are in Stairway, and all the tracks from those are here. Anyway, just realized "The Viet Cong Live Next Door" predated Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino by more than two decades; yeah, Clint's neighbors were Hmong, but it's not like he cared about the distincition. (Not sure yet what "AIDS Alley" and "Redneck 7-11" predated, but probably something.)

chuck, do you have the frankie eldorado album on epic from 1980? if not, keep an eye out. i think you would dig it. power-pop mostly, but nice touches. neat drum beats, riffage, hand claps. very bubblegum at times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBMKgz5AjcI

for the purposes of this thread, kasim sulton plays bass on the frankie eldorado album.

<img src=http://dickdestiny.com/queerpills.JPG />

1981, The Angry Samoans try to get around Rodney Bingenheimer's black list by releasing this, originally unmarked, as The Queer Pills. Somewhat less than two minutes all told for four blasts of the style which would carry over into [i]Back from Samoa</A>. "They Saved Hitler's Cock" is the famous tune, differing with a rawer more echo'd vocal. All vocals by Todd Homer, all the aliases chosen from various interests, A. Fish being Albert Fish, one of the first murderers if not the first to get the electric chair,
'Grace Bud' -- one of his victims spelled wrong (Budd), Frank Howard, the baseball player...

Maximum Rock 'n' Roll immediately pegged it as the Samoans in disguise. At which point the band began stamping unsold copies to go out with the name. It was awhile ago but I think 'ats what they told me.

<img src=http://dickdestiny.com/blatantsmall.JPG />

1978, from Jayne County & The Electric Chairs. Think we talked about her late last year or upstream?

Paradoxically, this is not so queer or punk rock as it lets on. "Fuck Off," the lead number is standard blooz rock played fast with guitar solo. If you want to play with Jayne's knee be prepared to put
out, if you don't want to fuck fuck off, if you want to stand in her bread line you'd better be ready to give of the meat. Rather funny still and well played.

"Mean Motherfuckin' Man" is about the second best. "Night Time Is the Right Time," the old blooz rock standard, done straight up.

Definitely a hard rock record originally with cachet in New York because it was, y'know, Wayne County.

Jayne's nose is still a big honker in the sleeve back picture, she'd later have it fixed, retold if I do recall correctly in the autobiog, Man Enough to Be a Woman.

<img src=http://dickdestiny.com/talesofmarcushook.jpg />

1973, Marcus Hook Roll Band 'Tales of old Grand-daddy' George Young and Harry Vanda before there was AC/DC but the Young brothers are playing on this and you can hear it. "Shot In the Head," ably covered by Savoy Brown, definitely shows the direction AC/DC would take. As do a few of the others and you might even hear traces of riff later recycled in the first couple AC/DC records. "People and the Power" still hasn't
aged with the chorus of "People don't have the power to change things anymore."

This record is uniformly good to excellent. If you're a big AC/DC fan and haven't heard of it before, you're in for a small but pleasant surprise.

Ahh, outsmarted myself. If you click the links you'll get the record covers.

http://dickdestiny.com/blatantbacks.JPG

More like it.

And Jools Holland even plays pianer on "Fuck Off." "You think you're hot shit, I heard/But you ain't nothing but ... a cold turd."

Mason Ruffner, Gypsy Blood. Spotted this guy's name in an article a buddy wrote and downloaded it on a whim 'cause I owned it on cassette in '87 and hadn't heard it since. A tragic waste, really; he was a Texas hard rock/blues guitarist who could really play, but the album (his second for Columbia) is slathered in horrifying synths and huge, vault-door-slamming gated drums (when the drums aren't programmed like something off the Miami Vice soundtrack). Closest point of comparison: probably Jeff Healey circa his appearance in Road House, except I actually like this better - or at least I want to. I never even wanted to like Jeff Healey.

So here's a question for any Canadians out there: How big were Max Webster, exactly? Were they superstars? Here's what Wiki says:

The band was successful in Canada, with hits such as "A Million Vacations," "Let Go The Line" and "Paradise Skies", although they never made it big outside of Canada. "Paradise Skies" was a minor UK hit, reaching number 43 on the singles chart there.

If you go to the pages for individual albums, a handful were supposedly certified gold in Canada, and one (A Million Vacations from 1979) platinum, but I don't know if that means they were really big upon release, or just sold over time on the long tail. In other words, it doesn't say how high they charted, or how long it took to earn those certifications (also, I have no idea how hard it is to get gold and platinum albums in Canada, though I assume the Content Code helps.)

They never had a single Billboard 200 album in the States. Kim Mitchell solo had one -- Akimbo Alogo, #106 in 1985, with the atypical goofball novelty hit "Go For A Soda" going #86. (It got a smattering of AOR airplay in Detroit, I remember -- maybe Buffalo, too? Where else?) Popoff claims Max Webster were revered "amongst small pockets of discerning rockheads throughout the States in Europe," but doesn't say how small, or where the pockets were, or whether they toured here much.

I'm guessing they mainly stuck to home. They seem like such an enigma to me -- hockey-barn prog, Zappafied hard rock. Closest musical U.S. equivalent would be who, Crack The Sky maybe? (Who sold steadily enough in the Middle Atlantic to chart between #124 and #186 on the U.S. album chart five times, between '76 and '90. Still, just a weird cult band.)

Just played Akimbo Alogo, which looks like a sellout record, and starts out like one, with that soda song, but still has four or five cuts ("Diary For Rock N Roll Men," "Love Ties," "Lager & Ale," "Rumour Has It") intense and twisted and metal enough to fit on any Max album I've heard. Popoff gave it a 9, and he gave Webster's Live Magnetic Air from 1975, which I also just played, an 8. The cut that most sticks with me, "Paradise Skies," was apparently their U.K. hit. No idea why they attempt something called "Sarnia Reggae." (Did many prog bands do that in the mid '70s? I was just noticing that Be-Bop Deluxe also did a couple lame reggae things toward the beginning of the first side of Live In The Air Age, which gets louder and better later. Maybe only prog bands with live albums with "Air" in the title did it.)

I also like that Max Webster have receding hairlines, and wear hockey jerseys. Actually, I'm not even clear they were considered "prog." Though Geddy Lee makes a fairly remarkable cameo appearance in one song on Universal Juveniles from 1980, so they probably were.

Also, how big in Canada were Goddo??

Jasper and Oliver: "Their music was appealing, subtle time-changes merging with powerful, stabbing guitarwork. On stage Mitchell stole the show with his outrageous dress and extrovert presence. Pye Dubois wrote the lyrics and they are sung as if by a madman!"

So what sort of things did Mitchell wear, exactly? Moose costumes?

Jasper and Oliver on Mitchell solo: "Solid weirdo hard rock, with lyrics to suit."

if you were a rush fan in canada then i think max webster would fit right in as far as quirkiness goes. kim mitchell might not have been as revered as alex lifeson, frank marino, or rik emmett, but they are all national treasures. you know?

still consider this one of the greatest "we are comfortable with our image and who we are" record covers of all time:

http://www.lpcd.de/1/E3462_01.jpg

devin townsend - of weirdo canuck metal fame - is soooooooooo right in that same un-self-conscious world where his balding skullet ends up being some physical manifestation of his genius and not a sales liability.

http://www.kids-iq-tests.com/BIPOLAR/Devin-Townsend.jpg

and geddy of course is the grand dame of supposed liability (huge ass nose, impossible falsetto, horrible hair) ending up being nothing but strength.

in the end: canadians more forgiving of physical imperfections. apparently.

(though rik and frank marino are exceptions...fairly photogenic chaps.)

I'm guessing they mainly stuck to home. They seem like such an enigma to me -- hockey-barn prog, Zappafied hard rock. Closest musical U.S. equivalent would be who, Crack The Sky maybe? (Who sold steadily enough in the Middle Atlantic to chart between #124 and #186 on the U.S. album chart five times, between '76 and '90. Still, just a weird cult band.)

They were part of the Rush management stable of acts and had a fair profile in the east for awhile.

Their debut was called Hangover in the US. The title cut is smart big guitar boogie and not nearly as weird as a condense from Jasper & Oliver would suggest. Crack the Sky was way weirder.

Some of the debut is very nicely written hard pop sung with winsome vocal -- "Blowin' the Blues Away" is one example.

"Lily," the last song on the LP, is a perfect example of this starting out as a piano ballad, morphing into a bits of prog, a stately march, some Who-like mini-opera strolling minstrel rock. By the end it sounds like what Blue Oyster Cult would sound like from Fire of Unknown Origin to Club Ninja which, you'll haveta admit, is fairly ahead of the competition if you like that stuff. Kim Mitchell can play like Buck Dharma, too.

Eccentric at time but not eccentric in a Zappa-like way, "Coming Off the Moon," for example being a straightforward hard rock smasher which definitely WILL remind of Crack the Sky in that the riff is straightforward but often the guitar goes off and does things which aren't hack or typical.

I really like "Hangover," "Blowin' the Blues Away" and "Lily" which divides into a mix of straight hard rock, a pop tune, and one that mixes it all up.

High Class in Borrowed Shoes was next with pic of the bank looking like Bowie-type glamsters on the cover. Which they sounded nothing like. Starts with a no-nonsense straight hard rock boogie, the
title cut, with a catchy hook.

Same formula as first album, mostly, second song is a pop ditty, something a little sappy in a McCartney way, then they unfurl more hard rock prog, "Gravity" which sounds like something from the first two Tubes albums, except before them I think.

"America's Veins" more midwest hard rock filtered through a Tubes-like sensibility. Seems to be about meeting a girl who was more than bargained for in a weird way on tour.

"Oh War!" -- metal sludge, "Oh war, it's been done before." Lots of fuzz guitar.

Neither of these records have obvious US FM radio singles on them and perhaps they were just a little too busy for the market here. Or maybe Anthem was far more interested in working Rush, an easier sell in the mid-size US theatres.

Mutiny Up My Sleeve was the last one I had. No longer do although the first two remain. "Astonish Me" was a great pop tune, maybe their best. Could have worked at radio as a bit more than a ballad, something hopeful and warm, something Steely Dan could have put in Can't Buy a Thrill.

For the lurkers, a lot of the stuff mentioned on this thread gets booted into YouTube, so it's fairly easy to sample with slideshows of album sleeves and band photos.

Now don't get overenthusiastic and bog the thread, pl-eee-z? I try to fight it myself.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/shaun.morris/Press/coventryeveningtelegraph260778.jpg

Amusing review of Wayne County's Blatantly Offensive EP.

And this is nicely done.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/shaun.morris/Press/Theprovince200680.jpg

that was me talking about wayne county albums. very impressed by the two late 70s albums i got a while back. was expecting some sort of haphazard novelty act a la cherry vanilla or divine, but instead got killer rock records that are totally in my keep pile.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/198/508374688_cade5c48e5.jpg

Yeah, I haveta say re Wayne/Jayne County. Was signed to MainMan in the mid-Seventies for awhile.

Speaking of Canadians, xhuxk mentions Mitchell's "Go for Soda" I think which refers to Frank Soda and the Imps, the band that backed Thor on Keep the Dogs Away. You can find this on YouTube, it was in Thor's An-Thor-Logy a few years ago. In '77, it greased as pre-Tappishing Tap, all three and a half priceless minutes of it. Antic posing fun.

So, the Tubes. Suddenly this board's favorite rock band, and about time. Pulled out Young And Rich, after being inspired by the revived old Scott thread about who made their T-shirts, and definitely enjoyed it a lot more than from the double What Do You Want From Live I'd pulled out a couple weeks ago (which nonetheless had some great moments, don't get me wrong.) Some notes: (1) Not sure how I'd never noticed before, but Y and R has some of the most hilarious (not too mention longwinded and multidirectional) liner notes in rock history, doesn't it? (2) As '70s Tubes LPs go, it's not especially a hard rock album, and I don't mind at all. In fact, it's basically an album of genre parodys -- blaxploitation soul, Phil Spector, disco, rockabilly, jazz, etc. (3) Also not sure why it never occurred to me before that "Pimp" should count as one of the world's first gangsta raps -- after say, Lightnin' Rod's Hustler's Convention or whatever. The music is even totally Superfly-style funk; the rude words (w/ chorus about controlling bitches "stole from a ten-year-old black kid" one Tube "pitcked up hitchhiking") spoken, and there's a part in the middle where they're actually rhymed rap-style. Though -- displaying my utter Zappa ignorance again -- did Frank also previously have raps like this, maybe even featuring pimps? Or am I all mixed up? (4) "Don't Touch Me There" probably influenced Meat Loaf's "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" a year later. Also very Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show, which didn't chart til '78 but I think may have come out a couple years earlier. (5) "Slipped My Disco" ("perhaps in the manner of Crown Heights Affair" say the notes) has to be one of the first disco parodies on record, this being just 1976. Good one, too. (6) "Proud To Be An American" is obviously their Elvis parody ("solo in tribute to that great American, Scotty Moore"), not to mention "Bicentennial salute" and "slick and commercial, for a necessary dose of rack-job appeal"; also, the words come at you really fast, and I'd like to see them on paper sometime. (7) "Madam I'm Adam," unlike "Bob" by Weird Al Yankovic, is not a palindrome. My wife (who mainly knows just the Tubes' early '80s MTV pop hits where it's hard for me to understand how they kept a straight face) said its multiple time changes reminded her of Steely Dan. Which probably isn't far off.

Album actually went to #46 in the Billboard 200 (way higher than the debut's #113), and "Don't Touch Me There" to #61 as a single (their only pre-1981 Hot 100 hit), so obviously it got some airplay. So who was their audience? Aging glamsters and/or Zappaphiles? Seems they're just too weird and unserious for prog fans, though they had the chops for them. (Also, what did early punks think of "White Punks On Dope"?)

zappa had "willie the pimp", a long song on hot rats with capt. beefheart on vocals.

um, and there are rhymes on willie the pimp. beefheart kinda rhymes.

when i was a kid one of my fave rap songs was i do the rock by tim curry. tone loc could have done a good cover of it.

Edith Sitwell giving readings
14 Moscow Road
Osbert's giving champagne parties
Sachie's got a cold
Gertrude's hanging pictures
Alice making tea
Me, I do the only thing that still
makes sense to me
I do the Rock
I do the Rock Rock

John and Yoko farming beef
raising protein quota
Sometimes they make love and art
inside their dakota
Rodney's feeling sexy
Mick is really frightfully bold
Me, I do the only thing that stops me growing old
I do the Rock
I do the Rock Rock
I do the Rock Rock Rock

Well, it's stimulating

Solzhenitzin feels exposed
build a barbed-wired prison
Nietsche's six feet under but his babies still got rythm
Einstein's celebrating ten decates
but I'm afraid philosophy is just too much responsibility for me
I do the Rock
I do the Rock

Baby Ruth and Dizzy Dean
Best and Colin Cowdrey
Little Mo, Virginia Wade
Pistol Pete and O.J.
I've always like Di Maggio
and Rockne's pretty knute you know
I could never wack a ball with such velocity
I do the Rock
I do the Rock
I do the Rock
It's stimulating - I'm a keen student

Liz and Dick and Britt and Liza
Jaclyn, Kate and Farah
Meg and Roddy, John Travolta
Governor Brown and Linda
Interwiew and People Magazine
Miss Rona and the Queen
It must be really frightfull to attract publicity
I do the Rock
Myself
I do the Rock
Carter, Begin and Sadat
Breznhev, Teng and Castro
eyeryday negotiate us closer to desastro
Idi Amin and the Shah
and Al Fatah is quite bizarre
I could never get the hang of ideoligy
I do the Rock
I do the Rock
I do - I do - I do - do the Rock

not my spelling by the way! just grabbed it from the web. in the 70's tim curry and warren zevon always reminded me of each other.

Hah, what was the Tubes audience? Not very big in places like Reading I can tell you. I had to order the debut album special at the local record store near campus.

I went to see them with my old college girlfriend and the place -- a smallish theatre -- was at best only little more than half full. And they were dragging around a very big stage show. All the stuff you see in the pics in the gatefold double live album, all of it was on board. TV sets, bondage slab, risers and levels, the crew dressed up as Che-style revolutionary soldiers for going into the audience, smoke, lights.

The old girlfriend became very upset when they did Mondo Bondage and Don't Touch Me There, the former which had Re Styles and Waybill doing their hardcore bondage scene skit with nudity. At the end Waybill as Quay Lewd comes out with a pretty convincing looking rubber tinkler hanging out of his silver lame underwear, at which point she wanted to get up and leave. She was a spoil sport so I said she could go and wait in the lobby if she liked.

Anyway, that all cost a lot of money and the fans weren't teaming in except in the big urban centers and in London, so the Tubes cost themselves and A&M much. A YouTube video from the Old Grey Whistle Test of "White Punks On Dope" imparts a small flavor of it. However, it never translated into sales.

Paradoxically, they're more successful "Talk to Ya Later" 'hit' period had to have been a lot cheaper.

And you're right, Young & Rich is a most un-hard rock hard rock record.

This new Ratt album really is good, unsurprising stuff. If you liked their first few records, this one's worth hearing - simple hard rock songs played with skill and plenty of energy, and Stephen Pearcy's nasal sneer is still in place.

So, speaking of rock bands like the Tubes (and see also Brownsville Station, School Punks, 1974) who did songs about "punks" mere minutes before punks started at least theoretically meaning something else entirely so you couldn't do that anymore (unless you were Van Halen, who waited until 1978 for "Atomic Punk"), turns out the most rocking cut on the 1976 self-titled Arista debut (and apparently only album) by Slik is "The Kid's A Punk," which sounds midway between the Bay City Rollers and the Sweet with a little Elton "Philadelphia Freedom" tossed in and talks about how said punk kid looks like James Dean and you can tell he's a loser because of how he dresses, so watch out. Apparently Slik were another Rollers-style teeny-rock attempt from Scotland (never charted in the U.S.), featuring future Ultravoxer Midge Ure, though I'm not sure which guy he is on the cover since none of them look like robots. In fact, they are all wearing unavailable-in-the-U.K. minor league baseball jerseys on the back, and on the front the guy with the red plaid shirt and a toothpick sticking out his mouth might be trying to look like Bruce Springsteen. All four guys have short, well-groomed hair, too -- in 1976! Only song Ure wrote is "Do It Again," which starts like a mix between Motown and Raspberries-style powerpop until some Thin Lizzyfied guitars come in near the end. (A few years later, Ure would collaborate on one of Phil Lynott's solo LPs.)

Otherwise, maybe half bleh ballads or fairly softie pop-rock, with just a couple exceptions: Side One closer "Requiem," which is sort of a Brecht-Weillish cabaret merrygoround swirl surrounded by Yarbirds-like Gregorian gloom voices at the start and end, and then the last two on Side Two: "Bom Bom", a cover of a great wacky tropical novelty funk dance song by Bahamas musician Exuma that Jimmy Castor Bunch had a low-level r&b hit with in 1976; and "Dancerama," partly a crass disco move but opening and closing with ornate classical prancing around, which gives way to some super funky breaks of the sort that hip-hop guys would later sample off of Babe Ruth and Barrabas records. Awesome.

Okay, just checked Wiki (and edited some of the above accordingly) -- turns out the track "Forever And Ever" went #1 in the U.K., and then "Requiem" to #24. Wiki claims the former was just as ornate, but it didn't sound that way to me on the album. Music at the beginning of "Requiem" is "the first accordes of Joaquín Rodrigo's 'Concierto de Aranjuez', which had been a number 3 hit just two months before in the UK for Geoff Love's orchestra, billed as 'Manuel & the Music of the Mountains.'" Apparently there are also personnel connections with the Skids, and Ure was in the Rich Kids before he wound up in Ultravox.

Bezerk Times -- 1978 Bersekley only in Europe -- was a two-fer, four sides of Berserkley
acts Greg Kihn, The Rubinoos, Earth Quake and Tyla Gang at Rockpalast in Germany. First LP was Kihn and The Rubinoos. The Rubinoos are, for this, awful. Live, they're very sin and over-devoted to sock hop accapella singing and it sounds like 15 minutes of The Beach Boys' "In My Room" only not as good. The last song, "Ronnie," jazzes the energy with some guitar and voltage but it's way too late to resurrect the performance. D-

Greg Kihn Band before Greg Kihn Band had 'hits' like "Jeopardy" and "Happy Man" -- way before. So Kihn does amiable club band pop rock, a little of which sounds like a very happy Lou Reed in phrasing.
It bounces and rocks a bit. If you like it that's because you like happy guys doing some rock in a bar. Kihn wasn't much of a writer on these tunes. They're not catchy. There were catchy tunes on his first couple albums. These aren't them.

Earth Quake has souped up the voltage since Rockin' the World, delivering their most aggressive shots starting with "Street Fever" which suffers from a poor mix with no bass. After the sound man gets his act in gear, odds improve on a medley of "Mr. Security" and something called "From Here to
Eternity". And the loud speed rock gets thrown down on the climax, "Trainride." Bringing it to a satisfactory close.

Tyla Gang is the real surprise. It's all tough and fast pub rock with hook from the Yachtless album and some early Stiff singles I think, notably a ditty called "Styrofoam," which a number of people have copied. Some of it treads in Mott-era Mott the Hoople territory, songs with titles like "The Young
Lords" and "On the Street" where they're totally into the Lords of Flatbush thing, and "Whizz Kid."
Great material played with great vigor, so you don't even notice that Sean Tyla really doesn't sing much, just telling you his rhyming stories while the band rocks out in time to the lyrics.

I loved this sampler in '78. Now I can totally do without the Rubinoos, who have no place here. And Greg Kihn is a fairly mediocre proposition, too. If you didn't like Earth Quake before this won't do it, either.

If you never heard the Tyla Gang you oughta. Avoid Moonproof which is nothing like this.

I think I have exactly one Tyla Gang song in my house -- "Fireball," on a real good pub rock compilation CD from a couple of years ago called Goodbye Nashville Hello Camden Town. I will listen to it. (Guess they also contributed some to the Berskeley Spitballs LP though.)

Picked up Greg Kihn's first solo LP for a buck last month; it's somewhere in the to-be-listened-to pile. I wasn't expecting too much.

Also still have my Tim Curry "I Do The Rock" 45, fwiw, Scott. (Though in '79 I mixed him up more with fellow rapper Ian Dury than with Zevon.)

And George, your Tubes date story was hilarious. That album of pre-debut cuts you mentioned upthread, though -- I'm wondering if those tracks are the same as this CD I have called Demo Daze And Radio Waves, which came out on Phoenix Gems Records in 2000. Five tracks of studio demos, Dec. 1973; three tracks of a Live Radio Broadcast out of Berkeley in March 1974; one live track from San Francisco, June 1974. Sounds like there might be overlap, at least; they definitely do that "white dopes on junk" thing in the middle of "White Punks," for instance, which lasts 6:27. The rest gets extremely fusiony and weirdly wacked-out real often, a precision mess, songs about lunch and TV game shows and mutated girlfriends and parents saying you'll never amount to anything, not that many of those were obvious to me just listening. Definitely a lot noisier than they are on Young And Rich, though.

Liner notes from guitarist Bill Spooner a/k/a Sputnik suggest that "White Punks On Dope" was actually about Jefferson Airplane (!), based on Gram Parsons having called them that in an interview once! He also says a few songs never wound up on Tubes LPs, because producers didn't like them, and the band was incapable of agreeing on what to include. And he claims lots of the band's original props and set were done "on a rock bottom budget - sometimes no budget at all." E.g.: Paper mache saxophones; eight-inch platform heels from V-8 juice cans.

I'm wondering if those tracks are the same as this CD I have called Demo Daze And Radio Waves, which came out on Phoenix Gems Records in 2000. Five tracks of studio demos, Dec. 1973; three tracks of a Live Radio Broadcast out of Berkeley in March 1974; one live track from San Francisco, June 1974. Sounds like there might be overlap, at least;

No live stuff on the thing I have but it sounds like the studio material you have was republished on
this one with some extra studio/home studio material scraped from the bottom of the barrel. Same story about "white punks on dope/white dopes on junk" in the liner notes to this one although Waybill keeps saying the lyrics also have something to do with rich kids in the SF scene. Lots of stuff about dimestore costumes, one set to be donned for something called the Dinosaur Stomp, kit made of oil cans, because the dinosaurs are now oil! Waybill and a couple of the other Tubes seem to concede this joke did not catch on with audiences although it was hard to get all the oil out of the oil cans so when they put them on, they always got drippings on themselves.

And one of the better songs is definitely one about parents telling something he'll never amount to anything. Song called "Hoy Boy" kicks everything off, then it's in to "White Punks on Dope."

Not absolutely hating the current album by this hairy co-ed stoner-blues duo from Brooklyn, fwiw, though I'm not ready to recommend you rush out and buy it, either, and I doubt I'll return to it much myself. (Plus, yeah, they're from Brooklyn. And a duo. And they call themselves Naked Heroes collectively, and George Michael Jackson and Merica Lee individually. So they have plenty of marks against them from the gitgo):

http://www.myspace.com/thenakedheroes

Also fwiw, the one duo of that ilk that I have wound up hanging onto the last couple albums by would be these guys -- Left Lane Cruiser, from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Probably helps that do lots of songs about food:

http://www.myspace.com/leftlanecruiser

http://dickdestiny.com/runaways76small.JPG

The Runaways Live at the Agora in '76, a radio broadcast which was probably issued on a small number of vinyl copies as a promotional. Since then it's been booted and reissued on CD, probably by several.

Not stepped on in the studio like the live in Japan disc so it sounds like you'd expect a hard rock band to be in the mid-Seventies. In other words, it takes them a few songs to get really warmed up.

The version of "Cherry Bomb" is the oddest I've heard, faster than on record with a meaningless guitar solo tacked on at the beginning before the singing comes in. It sounds like they had a bit of stage nerves.

Joan Jett still sounds really young, still singing out of her nose when she's not shouting.

By "You Drive Me Wild" the band's going and while some of these songs were never any good -- "Secrets", the cover of Lou Reed's "Rock 'n' Roll" -- the "Wild", "Is It Day or Night" and "Blackmail" are. The Runaways proved they could do turgid slow blooz rock so that you can strut poorly on guitar with "Johnny Guitar" and by that point, the crowd is entirely with them. "Johnny Guitar" was awful on their second album, it's not really better here, just mo-o-r-e louder.

"Dead End Justice" ends things and the bad girls juvie hall breakout equiv of "A Quick One While He's Away" is perfectly executed, still capable of making me laugh. Is the prison guard good looking, either Currie or Jett asks. "He hit me with a board, it felt just like a sword." Sounds like a Kim Fowley lyric to me.

And Joan Jett's Bottom Line concert from 1980, a radio broadcast by WNEW, in which she takes time out to thank all the DJs, Jim Testa, Vin Scelsa, etc. This is right after Bad Reputation and it underlines that the album was selling well, at least in part due to strong buzz from regional radio airplay.

This is right before I Love Rock 'n' Roll was recorded. The band has Eric Ambel on guitar who would leave to be in the Del-Lords. Smart move!

But the demos for the second, or pre-production songs, at least some of them, have already been done and "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" is on this as the first encore. Before anyone knew it would be a world wide smash.

It's interesting to hear the band rush through it, not giving it much of a sendup at all and the crowd, other than it being the encore, acting indifferent as it's not heard it. The one the band really wants to play is the second encore tune, "I Love Playin' With Fire."

Joan Jett used to do "Shout" ala "Animal House" on methamphetamines live and it's here and I still can't stand it although it was always a crowd pleaser. "Black Leather" which wasn't so hot on a late-period Runaways album after people were wandering away is redone a bit and here it sounds like good speed rock.

Good version of "Rebel Rebel" and most excellent is a cover of Charlie Karp & the Namedroppers' "Too Bad on Your Birthday" which Kasenetz-Katz also had Ram Jam do.

Something I don't think was put to vinyl called "Teenage Sex Machine" and the usual enthusiastic performances of "Wooly Bully," "Do You Wanna Touch" and "You Don't Know What You've Got", the latter which I've always thought was one of her best tunes, among quite a few.

Don't know why this was never made into a real live release. Guess they didn't have to resort to it
after the next album.

i was listening to Waitin' For The Night the other day and i'd forgotten how much i like that album. ""Little Sister" is such a great song.

So that '75 Greg Kihn debut that I mentioned in re: George's Berserkely comp appraisal a couple days ago wound up at the top of the pile quicker than I'd thought. Also sounds considerably less powerpop than I'd expected, at least until "Worse Or Better" at the start of Side Two. First side initially hit me as way too twee to bother with, though after a couple listens the guitar tapestries (at the end of "Any Other Woman" and "Kid From Louisville") and songs ("Kid From Louisville" again, plus "Emily Davison"'s movie-starlet-I-think suicide a la Hot Chocolate's "Emma") kicked in. Some very pretty folky-rocky melodies on that side too; George said "happy Lou Reed" about the comp tracks, and that might make some sense. Side Two rocks a little harder though not a lot harder, especially the aforementioned side-opener. After that Kihn does a decent cover of Jerry Butler/Righteous Brothers' "He Will Break Your Heart" with a good middle verse I'd never noticed before, then there's two songs that sound like precursors of, of all people, Electric Angels, the no-sell 1990 hair-glam band in Stairway's Top 40 (whose cassette maybe I should give a spin again soon.)

Anyway, an unassuming album, but likeably unassuming. And I assume Kihn might've got more into, say, Tom Petty or Rick Springfield territory later, though I'm not sure how many more dollar bills I'll expend figuring out when. What I mainly remember hearing on Detroit radio in pre-"Breakup Song"/"Jeopardy" days was the (I think) Springsteen cover "Rendesvous"; could've sworn he covered "For You"," too, but I'm not seeing it listed among his album tracks in Whitburn. Saw a whole bunch of different '80s Kihn LPs in the dollar bins at Waterloo today, though; if anybody knows whether any of them are worth that much, tell me. The 1986 one had a cover of the Only Ones' "Another Girl Another Planet," which surprised me. By then he'd apparently stopped charting.

Actually heard more Lou Reed, more seedy urban songwriting in general, on this '76 Elliot Murphy album Lost Generation (apparently his second) I've played a few times this week. Some Johnny Thunders and even Peter Laughner too, in ballad mode for both, in the melodies and songwriting, if not at all the guitars those names imply. Still seems kind of odd for a major label (RCA) album around that time, unless they were going for another Bowie or something. There's a real ambition toward glam decadence in the songwriting, Brian Jones namedrops and a whole song about Eva Braun (complete with reams of Hitler details which may or may not be supposed to be jokes, hard to tell) a couple years before the Boomtown Rats did one, but mostly lots of lyrics about urban teenagers having driven their lives off a cliff since nobody was watching, or whatever. White punks (and punkettes) on dope, I guess, except with way more pretensions toward poetry about it than the Tubes had. Tunes are good, though, especially on the second side -- "Lost Generation," "Manhattan Rock," and "Lookin Back" (seemingly his attempt at his own "Like A Rolling Stone") probably being the best. Not really hard rock, but somehow in the same headspace as a lot of stuff that was in the middle '70s. So how come nobody ever talks about the guy?

Actually, looks like Christgau talked about him (and unlike me spelled his first name Elliott correctly). He liked the debut, which I've never heard, best. Also gives no indication that Murphy had any connection to glam rock, though I swear I hear as much Reed and Bowie and Thunders as Dylan in his sound. (He does refer to the third album's production as "hard rock," though.) Maybe the glam's all in my head. Anyway, fwiw:

http://robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Elliott+Murphy

Marsh in the red Rolling Stone guide calls his lyric style "F. Scott Fitzgerald out of Lou Reed," so that's closer. (Still stretching it for this thread, though, so feel free to completely ignore all this.)

Oh okay, re: Kihn. Apparently he did "For You" on an album in 1977, but he didn't hit the Billboard 200 until his third album, in 1978.

i like that murphy album. that's a good one.

got the first steve gibbons band album yesterday. pub rock as seen thru the lens of the capricorn records roster. or something. i dig it.

http://www.musicobsession.com/Pictures/s/t/stevegibbons193825.jpg

got this yesterday and it makes me reassess how i feel about gong. i never listened to them much. had some later 70's albums that i never really listened to cuz they seemed too twee or something. (this was years ago though. i might like them more now.) anyway, this soundtrack is a mishmash of album stuff and god knows what else, but it's really cool. its got that propulsive jet engine thrust of krautrock/hawkwind/pink fairies. really like it.

http://www.progarchives.com/progressive_rock_discography_covers/848/cover_26141225112008.jpg

thanx for the CDs chuck! MUCH appreciated.

I've been on a Motorhead and Hawkwind trip for a month or so along with getting into some more rock organ/keyboard groups like ELP & The Nice along with picking up another Atomic Rooster CD "In Hearing of Atomic Rooster", all of these really inspired by watching a bunch of BBC documentaries on Youtube.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer was one of those 70s groups that was huge that I really never heard anything outside the radio. I got a couple of their albums and they are not quite as angry as I expected. There are moments on both Brain Salad Surgery and Tarkus that are have that drive, but I think the lack of guitar kind of brings down the violent sound. I do really like their version of "Fanfare for the Common Man" and that version of "America" by the Nice rocks. I just don't think a band like this one could ever make that kind of cash now.

Atomic Rooster definitely was a band with an identity crisis, but I guess ole Vincent was pretty much nuts, as the band and sound pretty much changes record to record. "In Hearing Of..." is interesting and has some good tracks, but it doesn't really hold a candle to "Death Walks Behind You" or even the first one with Carl Palmer.

Finally found a copy of "Warrior on the Edge of Time" by Hawkwind and also got "Quark, Strangeness & Time". Warrior is a pretty cool album, better than expected, as it is still really driving and psychedelic. Quark has some good tunes, but I do agree that a whole lot of the balls and drive must have left after Lemmy was gone. Maybe Hawkwind was just onto some other sounds, as Quark is a bit new wave sounding. I can hear a bit of Lydon in Calvert's singing, so I do get a where that comparison comes up.

I've been on a big Motorhead kick tied to Hawkwind and picked up four more of their albums going in order: "Another Perfect Day", "Rock n' Roll", "Iron Fist" & "Orgasmatron". I pretty much liked them all and really the one with Brian Robertson is really quite good, if his tone is a bit more rounded and not as edgy with all of the chorus. The band became less bluesy when Wurzel and Phil Campbell became the guitarists, but it is still pretty solid. I've liked it enough that I want to get into some of their later albums.

i always thought the best thing about The Nice was that every album had one or two killer pop/psych nuggets on them that completely overshadow emerson's wanking for me. you could make an album comp of Nice songs and it would be one of the best psych rock albums that people have never heard.

Re ELP, there's definitely guitar on the three-LP Welcome Back My Friends..." live thing. That was all over FM classic rock radio and even on TV when I was a kid, Lake playing a gold top Les Paul.

You can hear guitar on ELP's debut, too. And I'm sure there's some on [I]Brain Salad Surgery although it may be a bit indistinguishable from Emerson's fuzzy synthing.

The Isle of Wight live ELP CD that came out a few years ago has some violence to it. Comes with a TV broadcast of the performance, too. It's very similar to the Pictures at an Exhibition performance, the same year I think, maybe a bit earlier.

If I listen to ELP, I always go for Brain Salad or Welcome Back... first, the debut second, Tarkus if at all, third.

Here's me a couple years ago doing a wee bit of Keith Emerson imitation whimsically:

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2008/12/rock-n-roll-party-in-box-made-in-china.html

Surprisingly, I probably listen to ELP more now than Yes when I reach for that kind of thing. Originally, it was the other way around. Lake's voice aged a lot better with me.

xp You're welcome, Scott! And welcome to the Steve Gibbons Revival club!

Played Rossington Collins Band's Anytime Anyplace Anywhere from 1980 while making and eating ham and eggs and turning down the volume during the Sunday morning politics show commercials. Dale Krantz sure could belt it out Janis-style, and there are definitely a few guitar solos playing it pretty for Atlanta and a couple real funky breaks (most notably, almost Babe-Ruthily again, in the middle of "Don't Misunderstand Me," the single that went #55 pop) and boogie-woogieing Billy Powell ivory here and there. But outside of the single, the Skynyrd survivors sure do seem to have forgotten how to craft hooks. The lack of memorable tunes almost seems like a precursor of jam bands -- as is their boring name, maybe. Still, not a bad listen, in total.

Dug out Alvin Lee's In Tennessee last night and re-listened. Like it even a bit more than I did a few years ago for the Voice (mostly because of the video from RockPalast last week):

Alvin Lee used to be famous, but now he's unpopular like Robert Kidney. His new CD, In Tennessee, puts him together with Scotty Moore and what amounts to the Sun rhythm section. They're on board to play either slim-and-slam dancing tunes or rockabilly and rapid-fire blues jams tacked onto minute ravers harkening back to Lee's "Hold Me Tight."

Lee and company are ductile and pointed, though they deliver one or two five-minute selections too many. In Tennessee closes satisfyingly with "I'm Going Home." It doesn't collapse into clichés, Lee's calling card getting solid revivification from a much-less-is-a-way-lot-more treatment.

Man really love the Memphis rockin' rockabilly and Elvis -- so the Sun rhythm section loves him back for it. Funny how one can make this spare material rock so hard, the growl of rhythm guitar, lone snapping snare and hi-hat, the plonked acoustic bass that thumps, and attitude being worth its weight in gold. You can literally learn all you need to know about pure rock 'n' roll guitar from this record. Plus Alvin throws in some of his jazzy R&B jumps into the mix. And one old timey country blues, "Gettin' Nowhere Fast."

Plus it always helps if you can say "Ah-owwww!" real good. Next to about three TYA classic recordings, this is one of his best. And it closes on a southern-fried version of "Goin' Home."

bought some records and shuffling thru them i thought i noticed a 12 inch single of plastic bertrand's ca plane pour moi but it turns out its the whole album. american copy on sire. never heard the whole thing before!

okay, this is attempt number #22823424 to dig be bop deluxe. listening to sunburst finish for the first time right now...

i give up. and i don't feel like putting on drastic plastic or modern music either even though i've never heard them.

i put on steve gibbon band's rollin' on album instead.

i'm digging this album a little:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/MStanley_Friends.jpg

pre-dates the first MSB album by a couple of years. good joe walsh guitar on it too. epic closing track "poet's day" is pretty cool. on the track "funky is the drummer" joe walsh is introduced as "Mahavishnu Joe Walsh". which is pretty darn funny.

i always have to remind myself that michael stanley was in Silk. they had one decent album on ABC called smooth as raw silk.

now playing: randy burns and the sky dog band. from 1971. not really digging it. and it doesn't really belong on this thread anyway. here's xgau's review:

Randy Burns and the Sky Dog Band [Mercury, 1971]
My friend from New Haven says, "Except for `17 Years on Your River,' I don't think I'd like this record if I weren't from New Haven." Exactly. This is the kind of testament every loyal local group ought to leave, with a few excellent songs (I also like "Living in the Country") and lots of memories for all the folks it's entertained. Unfortunately, few local groups ever reach this level of competence, but in any case the economics of the music industry discourage such moderate success--if your appeal isn't big-time, you're lucky to record at all, and if it is, chances are even or better that you're working a dumb variation on somebody else's gimmick. Which is not to suggest that I'd give up one great industry group like Crazy Horse for a dozen Sky Dog Bands, but merely to lament a paradox. B-

Played a very manly but very shittily produced 12-inch seven-song EP I'd retained from 2004 by these guys, the Petitioners, who I still know basically nothing about, today. The vocals are Danzig-brute cloddiness, but they manage to do a real good version of Roky Erikson and the Aliens' "Creature With the Atom Brain" and a passable one of Manitoba and Wild Kingdom's "Speedball" (actually not sure I've ever heard the original version of that one), plus they do a sort of death-metal parody called "Sweden," and then one called "Over 30 (Need Not Apply)" where they visit the Capitol Building and Jimmy Iovine informs them their bassist used to be in Bang Tango and is secretly 45 years old.

http://www.myspace.com/thepetitioners

Am now playing a CD that Smog Veil sent me by these guys, This Moment In Black History, who are apparently from Cleveland (it being Smog Veil and all), even though the CD came with no press release. Most of it is just hardcore tantrums, so what, albeit with surprisingly tasty noisy guitar parts by a guy (named Buddy Akita their myspace says) who is not at all averse to melody or rock'n'roll rhythm. 13 songs in 32 minutes, not bad, including a noisy Run-DMC parody (with Schooly D-ish clank beats) called "My Notes" about, uh, how the guy rapping likes to carry around notes in his pocket. But don't worry, that's the only rap thing they do. And it jumps out of the tantrums as much as the guitar solos do. (Actually just played the CD,Public Square, twice straight.)

http://www.myspace.com/thismomentinblackhistory

Also played Black N Blue's self-titled album, from 1984, today. Total dumbshits, obviously, but rocking ones. Most memorable songs: "School Of Hard Knocks" (rhymes with "we're gonna rock your socks off"); "Hold On To 18" ("Jack and Diane" reference?? Also they say "I know what I need but don't know how to get it" so maybe they should've asked Johnny Rotten. What they want, obviously, is to stay young, even though nobody understands them now, since they're so young. No idea if they were really that young, though -- Whitburn only says they were from Portland); fast blitz "I'm the King" ("of the concrete jungle" -- a Wailers/Specials reference?); and their cover of "Action" by the Sweet (which they don't improve but manage not to destroy either.) (Ha ha, just checked Popoff - three of those, all but "Hard Knocks," are his favorites too. He gave the album an 8.) Anyway, don't think I've ever heard a Twisted Sister album this good (though that's clearly what they seem to be going for.) Went to #116 in Billboard; two followups which I've never heard went #110 and #133. Allegedly got some MTV play, too.

And Scott, that Plastic Bertrand LP is loads of fun! Can't believe you've never heard it before. (Think I also used to have a second one by him that was more discofied, though that's been gone for decades.)

Also, I clearly like Be-Bop Deluxe more than you (and less selectively than George.) Just played their often-enjoyable live double last week.

And earlnash, yeah, Hawkwind's Quark Strangeness and Charm is kind of new wave, but try not to hold that against it. (As is the Hawklords album, if you ever find it; mine's long gone but Scott taped me his on the other side of the Gettovetts' Missionaries Moving a few years ago; thanks Scott!) Also think Motorhead's Iron Fist has always been underrated, though I definitely side in general with their early bluesier stuff over their later more metal stuff. The one song I always really loved from Another Perfect Day was "Shine."

I was a huge Black 'N Blue fan back in the day. I was 11 when the debut came out and my best friend and I thought they were amazing. The first is the most rocking - Gene Simmons really sunk his claws into them deep for the followups, and they are definitely poppier. The second album, Without Love, is still my favorite; I think it is because they are so blissfully cheesy - songs like "Nature of The Beach" and "Rockin' On Heaven's Door" are as idiotic as the titles imply, but the band doesn't care. It also has their masterpiece, "Bombastic Plastic", which is trying to be real metal and failing beautifully, once again living up to its name; and a credible cover of "Same Old Song and Dance". The third album, Nasty Nasty had a good title track and the ballad "I'll Be There For You", which was the closest they came to a hit.

There was an Ultimate Collection comp that has everything you need if you're not a fan from their heyday.

Actually, the more I listen to that This Moment In Black History CD (four times in two days! That may not be a recommendation, per se', but it's something -- definitely can't say that about any other new album so far in 2010), the more I wonder if they're actually even classifiable as a hardcore band. They definitely do lotsa slamdancey songs (though oddly listenable ones -- usually scream-yelped in an intense high register that doesn't grate on me), but even those don't necessarily stay slamdancey. Rhythm section knows how to roll; doesn't always stick to moshpit polkas (though there's that, too.) Some notable guitar parts are in "Pollen Count" (which isn't that fast to begin with), "MFA," "About Last Night," "Panopticon" (maybe the most classic Cleveland punk sound -- Pagans maybe? Electric Eels?? -- on the record), "Photonegative" (more Detroit in that one), "Precinct" (more Sabbath doom). Definitely hearing some surf and psychedelic and spy-movie-soundtrack influence, too. Would love (1) some hardcore expert to calibrate what hardcore bands they most sound like and (2) some guitar expert to calibrate what guitarist the guitarist most sounds like.

Meanwhile, Tom Ewing on the Spike Drivers (a "precociously psychedelic Detroit band from c. 1966," Frank Kogan calls them):

http://ittookseconds.tumblr.com/post/372870480/five-minutes-and-thirty-two-seconds-pressed

And Joshua Langhoff on Helloween's all-covers album from a few years ago (which I also liked a lot, though I've never connected with anything else they've done. Supposedly they have a career retrospective coming out, though, so we'll see what happens with that one):

http://joshlanghoff.blogspot.com/2010/02/best-thing-i-heard-today-helloween.html

That was a decent album. The strength of it came in the choice of songs they were actually good at. More than half of them, as it turned out.

Good version of "Faith Healer" by SAHB, "Locomotive Breath" by Tull, "Space Oddity" and the Beatles "A;; My Loving." In addition to those mentioned. Not so good, an Abba cover, a latter period Mahogany Rush thing, the Scorpions "He's a Woman, She's a Man" -- too close to home, and Faith No More.

I think Stradivarius might have done one of these collections, too.

listening to a punk comp from 1983. The Defiant Pose. well, mostly punk. the first side has the alarm and wall of voodoo and the fall on it for some reason. but the second side is one great anthem after another.

you know, i might change my mind tomorrow if you asked me, but "loud, proud, & punk" just might be my favorite punk anthem of all time. i couldn't even tell you how many times i've played it. and when i play it i have to play it at least five times in a row. just like demented teenaged scott would have.

1. Holy War - Lords Of The New Church
2. Drug Train - The Cramps
3. Marching On - The Alarm
4. Gone Are The Days - Crown Of Thorns
5. On Interstate 15 - Wall Of Voodoo
6. Fiery Jack - The Fall
7. The Crack - Cosmetics
8. Evacuate - Chelsea
9. Reality - Chron Gen
10. Loud Proud & Punk - The Business
11. Mr Nobody - Major Accident
12. Insane Society - Menace
13. Fascist Dictator - The Cortinas
14. Red London - Sham 69
15. The Freeze - The Models
16. Political Stu - Circle Jerks

Endtables reissue comp on Drag City is great! You need this, chuck. late-70's Louisville band led by giant transgender/transvestite singer who kinda sounds like david thomas. very stooge-y punky stuff. probably been reissued in the past, but this is from the original tapes and has great live stuff on it as well. 15 year old bass player rules. i'm gonna write it up for my Decibel column. all the recordings are from 1979.

http://a302.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/34/l_1b04c32e6f5ac605a2c791ded890c4d5.jpg

Also, I clearly like Be-Bop Deluxe more than you (and less selectively than George.) Just played their often-enjoyable live double last week.

Live in the Air Age pretty much spans the Bill Nelson gamut from pastoral to gymnastic on guitar. "Blazing Apostles" is probably my favorite from it. Jaunty and Euro and by the last third of it the band bites down.

My fannish enjoyment of Savoy Brown knows no bounds. A cover version of "Needle and Spoon" from Raw Sienna.

http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/2010/02/09/funky-rock-n-roll-needle-and-spoon/

Listening to Alvin Lee's Saguitar from 2007 which I kinda remember xhuxk reviewing but I couldn't find it.

His "Rapper" song eats it. Take that off and you have an album about as consistent if not quite as
good as In Tennessee although more hard rocked.

"Smoking Rope" is "I'm a Man" update and if you like the Memphis tapeslap sound, it's liberally sprink;ed all through the record.

There's a song called "Memphis" which is not the original, somewhere between Johnny Cash and Elvis doing hard rock.

First four tunes sound like the Ten Years Later band only Alvin's songwriting is better than it was on Rocket Fuel.

And there's a Live at Rockpalast CD of the Ten Years Later band containing almost the same set TYA was doing at the Fillmore Easts and Wests in the early Seventies. Only Ten Years Later covered
"Hey Joe".

It's Friday and this is too odd and funny for many words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHtatY7bOUY

The Savoy Brown track I really love is "Hellbound Train". It is a great doomy sounding blues tune, kind of unique sound to some of their other stuff.

Now you've made me want to pull it out and play the entire record. I think I will!

There was a copy of 'Street Corner Talkin' at the record store tonight. $6.99. I passed, even though I love 'Lookin In'. I predict Gorge will tell me the mistake I made..

i passed on a copy of savage return last night! and i need it too, but i just didn't have the cash cuz i was buying other stuff.

One of the more unusual Savoy Brown records. Actually leaning very strongly into heavy metal. Simmonds never repeated it. One number on it sounds exactly like Axl Rose is on vocals, years and years
early.

Nah, no mistake between Looking In and Street Corner Talkin'. Two totally different bands. First is Simmonds backed by Foghat with Lonesome Dave. SCT is Simmonds backed by Chicken Shack with Dave Walker on vocals.

I like them both. Looking In is brooding, particularly on "Money Won't Save Your Soul." Nothing like that on SCT which is one of the more jaunty SB records, turning out to be their best seller in the US and the one with the highest chart action.

Plus Savage Return is produced by Lange before he was 'Mutt.'

i know i would dig savage return a lot. i want all 70's savoy brown eventually. i'm almost there. maybe if i get a chance to go back to that spot, i'll pick it up. just a matter of finances. i picked up some power pop/new wave/punk stuff instead. here's what i got:

The Demons - s/t (Mercury - 1977)

Snopek - Thinking Out Loud (Mountain Railroad - 1979)

The Cortinas - True Romances (CBS - 1978)

20/20 - Look Out! (Portrait - 1981)

The Pop - Go! (Arista - 1979)

Pezband - s/t (Passport - 1977)

Brotherhood - s/t (RCA - 1969)

i'm always looking to upgrade my brotherhood albums. can never find perfect copies! i love those things. there are two if you don't count their experimental psych/krautrock album friendsound. post-raiders band for drake levin and phil volk.

Demons album is pretty cool. "I Hate You" is the best track by far. all about the horrible things the singer wants to do to some girl. mostly he just wants to kill her. but also open her mouth and fill it full of mace.

http://www.vinylrecords.ch/D/DE/Demons/Demons/the-demons-10.jpg

bonus back cover!

http://www.vinylrecords.ch/D/DE/Demons/Demons/the-demons-11.jpg

putting stuff out in the store and i come across The MCA Sound Conspiracy, a comp MCA put out in 1971 to sell its bands on various labels such as Decca, Kapp, Uni, and Coral. here are the bands they are promoting:

wishbone ash (love them)
help
matthews' southern comfort (love them)
melissa
american eagle
fanny adams
virgil fox (strangest act to ever be sold to a hard rock audience?)
chelsea
glass harp (love them)
jeremiah (had this album. terrible. really bad.)
raw

out of all them , southern comfort was the only one with a genuine hit.

i never tire of the fuzz sludge cover of california dreamin' on the brotherhood album. drake 4ever.

I had that Demons album. Don't remember a thing about it except the cover. I'd pay at least five dollars to know if Robbie Twyford and Martin Butler are still crossdressing.

robbie looks a little like wayne county!

you'd like "I Hate You". i wonder if GG Allin was a fan. the lyrics are totally proto-GG.

"She's So Tuf," "She's a Rebel."

the song "Hamburger Holocaust" on the Snopek album could easily be a Tubes song, a Crack The Sky song, or a Tin Huey song. Take your pick. so why would i rather listen to these bands than a Zappa record? it's a mystery.

Demons fellah:

http://martinbutlermusic.com/bio.html

curious about the Fanny Adams album sampled on that MCA sampler. serious slow bloooze thud rock stuff. and an aussie band too! guitarist played with the beegees apparently. and before they settled on Fanny Adams they were called Thighbone Howl! Wonder if they played any Buffalo gigs. They aren't that far off.

250,000 copies! really? seems like a lot. but what do i know.

Yeah, halfway to gold seems high. 75,000 would have been exceptional for a band like that.

The first seven Bob Seger albums are on the net all in one place, so I downloaded a few so as to make better sense of the reissue threat which made it all sound fair to great.

Couldn't stand the guy after he was all over the radio, much like my aversion to Steve Miller after The Joker. Too many bar bands doing too many nights filled up with the stuff.

Anyway, I'm going to digest the debut, Mongrel, Back in '72 and Seven tonight.

Originally, I had Beautiful Loser and the live Silver Bullet band thing. BL was a mixed affair, "Jody Girl-type" stuff, I hated. "Nutbush City Limits" was cool. Also always liked "Get Out of Denver."

the debut and mongrel are so great. truly truly great. haven't listened to back in '72 in a long time.

er, by debut i mean ramblin' gamblin' man. which was his capitol debut anyway.

i still need a copy of noah.

wait, i don't know why i said his capitol debut. it was the first album he ever put out. don't mind me.

Listening to Ramblin Gamblin Man and [/i]Mongrel[/i]. Initially boy, by the late Seventies he'd really shmaltzed it up and toned the thumping funky hard rock down. I can hear the shmaltz starting to creep in around Back in '72, certainly not like when he got gigantic, but the nugget of it is crystallizing. "Stealer" has him imitating Free. Boy, he'd never do that again.

This could just as well be on Rolling Country but it's roots rock n roll. Know idea that Little Jimmy Dickens actually had a record company which thought he was worth singles and LPs since his rep is 'pet' of Brad Paisley.

Been listening to Rock Me which is thirty tunes of straight rock n roll, rockabilly and country, pretty much minus the look-at-the-fat-ugly women and she-makes-my-dick-hard jokes and skits tacked onto the end of Paisley
albums.

And all the time I thought he was just the Fifties version of a short person expressing his lifelong rage at women for being turned down for only coming up to their crotches. Well, wait ... at least the songs on this don't feature that. The Grand Ole Opry, I imagine, wouldn't cotton to it.

Paisley's veiled dirty joke re Carrie Underwood at an award ceremony this year makes a lot more sense when you've absorbed more Little Jimmy Dickens, this album of which sounds like fair knock-off Hank Williams and Sun rhythm section stuff.

Don't take this too seriously. Little Jimmy Dickens sucks. If you were moved to write a Twilight Zone episode, you could base it on being trapped in a bar where Little Jimmy Dickens played every night. One expects more from titles like "I'm Little But I'm Loud" or "Wait Til the Ship Hits the Sand" and they never deliver.

I can't believe I wasted a 30 cent slave-labor-in-China made CD-R on this.

"Where the Buffalo Trud" and he really means 'house full of mud/where the buffalo turd/is a mighty mighty messy messy house'. Except with 'turd' instead of 'trud' it doesn't rhyme. Haw.

Ha ha. Maybe we should just rename this the "Rolling Whatever Old Music Three Old Guys Happening To Be Listening To Today" Thread.

And now I'm wondering whether Roger Miller's "You Can't Rollerskate In A Buffalo Herd" was really about skating in buffalo turds, too.

Anyway. Believe it or not, I only own a couple of the pre-Beautiful Loser Seger albums per se' myself: The Bob Seger System (w/ "Ramblin Gamblin Man" and "2+2=?" etc.) and Seven (w/ "Get Out Of Denver" and "UMC" etc) on vinyl; Smokin O.P.s on CD. The first two of those are good but admittedly spotty (as is Beautiful Losers obviously); the third is a covers album that, to be honest, has always struck me as fairly pointless. Not sure why I ever would've gotten rid of Mongrel, since I always thought "Lucifer" was great; must have decided that was even spottier. But honestly, right now I'm fine with the 1966- 1967 bootleg CD that my wife gave me for Christmas, and even more so, the close-to-flawless 27-song CD-R (which he decided to name Never Mind the Bullets Here's Early Bob Seger) that MX80-loving ILMer Myonga Von Bontee put together late last fall and generously sent out to people like Scott and me. Still very much considering giving that one 30 Pazz & Jop points this year.

Then again, I've never personally had a problem with Stranger In Town and Night Moves, which, while admittedly not as unabashedly hard rock and a little more ballady than the earlier albums, are a lot more consisently crafty (which is partly to say the ballads tend to be a lot better than his earlier ballads), and have songwriting peaks at least as high. Seger doesn't start to lose me until the '80s, really, and I even like a couple songs after that okay. Related thread:

Bob Seger Reissue News

could easily be a Tubes song, a Crack The Sky song, or a Tin Huey song. Take your pick. so why would i rather listen to these bands than a Zappa record?

Because they (and heck, throw in MX-80 Sound too) rock harder and have catchier, more memorable, less amorphous songs than Zappa did 95 percent of the time, maybe? Or at least that's always been my (possibly ill-informed) impression. But there's tons of Zappa I've never checked out, so who the heck knows? Guess I've kinda had a prejudice against the guy since high school, and always assumed his jokes were stupid, though he must have had something going on, since his sound clearly influenced lots of bands I like. (Oh yeah, also throw in Uz Jsme Doma and Jono El Grande, whose albums got 10 Pazz & Jop points from me each last year. And Plastic People Of The Universe/Pulnoc too, right? All those East Europeans.) So clearly I'm some kind of closeted Zappa fan who just won't admit it. Would definitely welcome recommendations. I do kind of like "Flower Punk" and "I'm the Slime," if that's any help.

By the way, anybody have any opinion about the Plimsouls? I've always assumed they were utter wimps, early powerpop-sans-power twerps, but I got this CD recorded live on Halloween 1981 in the mail last week, and the sound's way too thin and muddy, but I'm maybe getting the idea that they might have been, say, a West Coast version of the Romantics (which wouldn't be bad) as opposed to, say, ick, a West Coast version of the Fleshtones (which comparison Christgau made once.)

ugh, the Plimsouls! talk about boring, nothing there wanna-be power-schlock irritants. caught them opening for Costello at the Greek back in '82 to my eternal regret. let's just say that compared to their interminably monochromatic set even the drabbest of the drab Elvis C Imperial Boredom ballads sounded like good fun. thanx for a lot reminding me, Chuck. i hope to return the favor one day.

Man, that album by The Pop is all kinds of good. I know I had some singles by them, but never a full album. They were really going for the cheap trick vibe as far as the power pop goes. meaning, there is more actual *power* on the album as well as excellent pop hooks. produced by earl mankey of sparks and concrete blonde and god knows what else. oh, and some songs just sound like cheap trick a bunch. which is fine by me.

and really digging the cortinas album too. tricky song structures. another one of those brit pop punk bands with secret love for prog.

that demons album is pretty wimpy in comparison actually. to both the cortinas and the pop album. but it does have its charms.

But there's tons of Zappa I've never checked out, so who the heck knows?

Me but I'm too hungover right now to list it all. "Why Dontcha Do Me Right" by examples immediately comes to MY mind. "Directly from My Heart to You" on Weasels Ripped My Flesh. And yoiu gotta love "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" from Absolutely Free if only for two lyrics: "Be a jerk/Go to work!" and the "Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup/Strap her on again/Oh baby!" thing.

This:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_Allures

Lotsa stuff on Shut Up n Play Yer Guitar.

"The Illinois Enema Bandit" from Zappa in New York, a couple others on that, also "Punky's Whips."

A lot of Them Or Us, where he has Steve Vai all over.

http://www.amazon.com/Them-Us-Frank-Zappa/dp/B0000009TA

Guess I wasn't as hungover as I thought. There's more...threat or menace?

"Man With the Woman Head", "Muffin' Man" from Bongo Fury, actually most of the second side and "Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead" because I like it, although it's more a show band tune.

"I'm the Slime" from Over-nite Sensation

Backing up John Lennon on Some Time in New York City aka Playground Psychotics/A Small Eternity With Yoko Ono, particularly "Baby Please Don't Go."

i DO like zappa. i like most of the 60's mothers stuff. i like stuff on most of the studio albums from the 70's up to but not including studio tan. the live 70's stuff can be ridiculous in a jaw-dropping way. and funky! like p-funk and mahavishnu and miles davis in rock mode and every fusion band ever all playing at once. which is definitely not for everybody, but he could get seriously heavy when he wanted to. the sour anti-hippie stuff and dated boob and race humor is what makes me cringe sometimes. but like i said, i'm rarely in the MOOD for zappa. you know? but i have respect.

that was me. scott. using maria's computer at the store.

LOVING this album the other day by the way. frank zappa on drums, i think. from 1965. awesome BIG BIG beat sandy nelson sunset strip type surf instrumentals. HIGHLY recommended. love the production. HUGE drums.

http://lebowskisays.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/hollywoodpersuaders.jpg

Odds and ends, and excuse me if this repeats what's upthread:

--Runaways movie's been generating great excitement for months among livejournal twenty-something lesbians who like High School Musical.

--Depends on the actual character of the actual movie, but the Runaways would definitely be NPR fodder just as a movie about the Stooges or the Dolls or the Velvets or the Kinks would be NPR fodder. Doesn't mean that that would be the movie's prime audience, just that NPR would be fine with it unless it's fundamentally pr0n. NPR might portray the band more as proto-punk than as girl-glam, and might not mention Gary Glitter, but that depends on the reviewer and what he or she knows. Someone's being NPR doesn't automatically make that person dishonest, and if Ken Tucker were reviewing he'd get it right, 'cept I don't think he does movies for them. (In '76 I had a convo with my favorite film teacher, Bill Routt, in college, who agreed with me that the Ramones were too cartoony to be real punk rock; he cited the Runaways as real punk rock, also the Dolls. I hadn't heard the Runaways, but disputed the Dolls being real punks since they were too generous and intellectual. Not too generous and intellectual for me, mind you - I have nothing against genuine intellectualism, not to mention intelligence - just too intellectual to fit into the category "punk," which I didn't use as an unmitigated compliment. I suggested Lynyrd Skynyrd as real punks. I'd have gone with "Smokin' In The Boys Room" too. I didn't know the Tubes had put "punk" into one of their album titles; it's just that they sounded like creep kids acting tough. My idea of punk was that it was made by punks, i.e., weak, potentially vicious kids sounding tough. The Rolling Stones weren't punks but Syndicate Of Sound and ? & The Mysterians and all those kids swiping riffs and rave-ups from the Yardbirds and hardness from the Stones were punks. In the mid '70s I'd have considered metal bands willing to play fast as punk, unless they were too into showing off their musicianship. I thought the Stooges were about punk rather than being punk. That's a compliment. I'd rather be about punk than be punk myself. But anyway, usage changed on me, so I then went with the Stooges as my model: turn-our-bodies-inside-out-and-throw-'em-on-the-gears romantics - except I keep including aspects of my old definition anyway.)

--The first couple of those Runaways advance reviews were creepy. Using the word "pedophile" or "perv" does not make one clever, and those reviewers come off as stupid ignorant mediocrities pretending to a chipper kind of knowingness. As for what actual teens actually like, that surely depends on which teens, since they're hardly homogenous, and some teens will be proud of liking what other teens don't. But a Runaways movie might be a hard sell to any audience. We'll see. If the film is coming up through Sundance it might be positioning itself as "cool" rather than going for the mass teen market. Or it might be going for both the cool and the mass audience at once, which is what Bandslam tried with disastrous results commercially (didn't see it, but apparently it was a sensitive indie-leaning movie that attempted to sell itself as a knee-slapping teen comedy).

--Speaking of Bandslam, a friend of mine gave me the CD; not worth spending much on, since presumably you can come up with "Rebel Rebel" and "Femme Fatale" easily enough if you don't already have 'em. A couple of promising tracks by a couple of unknowns (the Burning Hotels' "Stuck In The Middle," or stuck between Franz Ferdinand and glam, at any rate; and the Daze's "Blizzard Woman Blues," which is a good Jon Spencerish mess), and actually worth hunting down is I Can't Go On, I'll Go On ft. Aly Michalka covering Steve Wynn's "Amphetamine," Aly being entirely credible on hard rock, with soul horns a nice touch. The other Aly numbers, though, are forgettable, a predictable "I Want You To Want Me" (I much preferred that Mexican actor's comedy take last year) and a reasonable version of "Someone To Fall Back On," which unfortunately is a song I hate. I Can't Go On, I'll Go On ft. Vanessa Hudgens doing "Everything I Own" is almost unlistenable, Hudgens trying a rocked-out version of the old Bread song. Director Todd Graff's liner notes say, "Anyone who thinks Vanessa Hudgens is just a dance pop diva need only listen to her wail the climactic note at the end of the song. That's all her - no studio tricks." (Hudgens - whom I'd never call a diva - has somehow done five or so great songs in her life, and maybe the greatness isn't just luck or coincidence when you're up to five, but she still doesn't have strong voice or much in the way of vocal personality, and "wailing" isn't in her range, at least not without the help of a studio.)

--Smog Veil is the only label left that sends me actual physical copies of CDs, though I've confessed to Fly PR that they're not likely to get more than blog or message-board action from me. But I do listen to what gets sent, while I almost never listen to what comes linked on an email. Anyhow, on one listen while doing the dishes I liked This Moment In Black History enough to think, "I'll likely give this more listens." Hardcore With Chops is how I categorized them, and that could be anything from emo to art rock, actually, but anyhow there's plenty going on from what I could tell while not paying attention.

--My guess is that you get very few Pazz & Jop voters voting only "Pitchfork albums"; it's just that the other albums and tracks they vote for don't coalesce into any particular area. It's not those voters' fault that they're the sort who care enough to vote in a Voice year-end poll. (To my surprise I discover I've got a Phoenix album from 2000 that I must have listened to, liked enough to keep, and then totally forgot about, including anything about how it sounds. Did they used to be better? I guess I'll find out in the next week or so.)

The first couple of those Runaways advance reviews were creepy. Using the word "pedophile" or "perv" does not make one clever, and those reviewers come off as stupid ignorant mediocrities pretending to a chipper kind of knowingness. As for what actual teens actually like, that surely depends on which teens, since they're hardly homogenous, and some teens will be proud of liking what other teens don't. But a Runaways movie might be a hard sell to any audience.

Yeah, they were. Done by people who probably listen to NPR and believe it has an audience that counts for something.

And I say that as someone who's actually been on NPR a number of times. It has no audience compared to real radio.
True story although a little off track: I was invited to do a half hour segment on terrorism and national security stuff a couple years ago and the the interviewer, it might've been Terry Gross, was so ignorant on basic issues I'd personally dealt with I had to keep correcting her. As a result, the session become became unbearable at about fifteen minutes in, we agreed to quit and it never aired. So, as an understandable consequence, I've nothing but contempt for things 'NPR' or NPR-ish. It's radio for people with a certain set of preconceptions and received wisdoms about things, kind of like the anti-matter of general GOP talk readio.

I think The Runaways will, as you say, be a hard sell. It'll be limited to the Laemmle in Pasadena, I bet, which is the art house -- and it's a nice play to see niche movies. But it's audience is at least half retirees because of a generous age discount, never young people, and the upper middle and upper crust from in the town who would have never brooked or had any exposure to the reality.

Hmmm, I deleted the This Moment in Black History e-mail as soon as it came in. Maybe I shouldn't have.

The Phoenix song I remember liking from that album (which I also didn't hate at the time, though I no longer own) was "If I Ever Feel Better." For some reason I always confused them back then with a different French band, called Mellow, who I guess everybody quickly forgot about.

Scott, is the album by the Pop you got their self-titled indie one from 1977, or their Arista one called Go! from 1979? George is a fan of the debut though not the followup if I remember correctly; Christgau gave both B+'s. I've never heard the first one. Have always thought the followup was pretty good but not great; pulled it out a few months ago and liked whichever songs had powerchords, and whichever ones were sort of artsy in a Roxy/early XTC/20-20 kind of way. Don't remember ever thinking of Cheap Trick (or the Clash, who Xgau mentions.) Will try to play it again sometime soon to figure out which tracks those were.

Yesterday I saw a mid-'70s K-Tel-type comp in a Salvation Army with a Barry Mann song from 1976 I'd never heard of before on it called "The Princess And The Punk." Would have bought it had it been selling for $1, but they wanted $2, and I have principles. Apparently the song went to #78 on the Billboard 200 in August of '76, two months after the Ramones' debut charted. In case you wondered, Barry Mann's only actual hit as a performer -- as opposed to a songwriter with his wife Cynthia Weil -- was "Who Put The Bomp (In The Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)," #7 in 1961.

I think what's always bugged me about Zappa might mostly be his vocals, which have always struck me as smug and distanced in a way I just couldn't get past. But that's no reason to ignore the guitars, I'm sure. And as I said, there's tons I haven't heard, and the guy was so ridiculoulsy prolific that his output has always just hit me as overwhelming; I never knew where to start. Got reissues of a couple Mothers albums in the mail several years ago, and had trouble getting through them. But somebody I'll try to hear some tracks George named.

Zappa might mostly be his vocals, which have always struck me as smug

That'd be right, sardonic and/or 'creepy.' But I like that, maybe just not all the time.

xp "...someday I'll try to hear...," obv.

Also, great to see Frank on this thread! (The Phoenix album I was referring to was their 2000 debut one, United, btw, if that wasn't clear. The more recent stuff I've paid attention to definitely seemed duller to me, and like I said, after initially thinking it was okay I decided even that early CD was too marginal to even hang on to. Still stumped about why they eventually picked up such a critical rep.) (Also, never "hard rock" at all, btw; though I think I determined early on that they were somehow trying to update '70s soft-rock. Which is probably why inititally they seemed potentially interesting to me.)

Speaking of The Runaways movie, having a video performance of Joan Jett & the Blackhearts doing a perfunctory, even crappy, run through of "Cherry Bomb" in the videos section -- it's number 6, after all the interviews, doesn't do it any favors. Should have resisted the urge to expand the site beyond the trailer.

I love the first Phoenix album. United. I still have my copy that i got via you probably. i bought the next one hoping it would be more of the same and found it really dull. kinda bummed me out. haven't listened since. though obviously i hear their big hit in that car commercial all the time these days. i like Mellow too! or the one album i have anyway.

yeah, the Pop album i got was Go! I posted the records i bought the other night upthread a ways. 20/20, cortinas, pezband, demons, the pop, snopek. kind of a theme to my buying choices i guess. there are VERY definite cheap trick moves on Go! when i go to the store tomorrow i'll play it again and see which specific tracks they are.

you might try Weasels Ripped My Flesh by zappa, chuck. aside from having one of the greatest record covers of all time, its got some great guitar and even lowell george is on it. "the eric dolphy memorial barbecue" is a great tune. all live tracks, but its more than just a live album.

actually, i think it would be REALLY interesting just to hear what you have to say about any random zappa album. just to see what you make of them.

i thought the this moment in black history disc sounded kinda cool. but man i can't get past how dumb that name is. what if they get really good and actually get popular and are stuck with it?

i REPEAT, get your hands on the Endtables reissue from drag city. I think they are pretty good about sending promos out if you ask nice.

and, chuck, thankthankthank you for that x reissue! i can't even tell you how much i love that thing. jeez, just that first song "suck suck" alone! i should have heard that a long time ago.

don't tell regular ilx people this, but i don't worship the saints. i LIKE the saints. and no doubt stranded is one of the top tracks of the 70's, but when i play entire albums by the saints i start to get bored. x are WAY more my speed. as are grong grong. never really listened to radio birdman much. my fave saints album might actually be their van morrison homage all fools day on the mighty tvt records. as far as 70's one-iconic-punk-anthem bands goes i'd rather listen to an album by the only ones. and its weird cuz on paper i should love the first three saints albums as much as i love the first three wire albums or buzzcocks albums or take your pick of 50 other albums by 50 other bands.

Actually, really don't tell anybody, but I've never even been that huge a fan of "I'm Stranded." Like it fine; never cared about it. Would not end up on a list of my 500 favorite singles from the '70s.

Thinking of emailing Drag City about Endtables, but hesitant since I never wound up writing about that album by Death I begged out of them last year (which did at least make my Pazz & Jop ballot) or the new one by Red Krayola With Art & Language I begged out of them a couple months ago (which sounded so formlessly snoozy that I couldn't get into at all, despite it theoretically consisting of "profiles" of Wile E. Coyote, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, John Wayne, and Ad Reinhardt -- the "profiles," inasmuch as I could pay attention to them, apparently in turn consisting at least partly of spoken word descriptions of how the profiles of said celebs' faces look. But every time I tried to listen, my mind would wander within minutes. Fwiw, I've never been what you'd call a big Red Krayola fan -- don't even know most of their stuff - but I used to think Kangaroo! was okay, and I kind of like the '68-'02 singles comp that Drag City put out a few years ago.)

In other artsy-farsty news, I played the first Ultravox album (self-titled 1977 one with exclamation mark at end of title) twice in the past few days, which has never happened before in history. Biggest surprise was "Satday Night In The City Of The Dead", the opening oi!- before-the-fact terrace shout with rappy vocal rhythms reminiscent of "Subterrranean Homesick Blues" and/or what Costello's "Pump It Up" would sound like a year later. Second biggest surprise was how much "I Want To Be A Machine," which is over seven minutes long including the weird string parts toward the end, and maybe "The Wild The Beautiful And The Damned," almost six minutes long, reminded me of Van Der Graaf Generator, though it's possible the band (and producer Eno) were aiming more for the more prog end of '70s Roxy Music. "Wide Boys" at start of Side Two was faster and more fun, like the less prog end of '70s Roxy and with lyrics that sure sound more like "white boys" to me. Reggae attempts in the middle of Side Two seemed sadly rhythmically inept even when called "Dangerous Rhythm." Closer "My Sex," supposedly the album's classic cut though I'm not entirely sure why, predates both the Austrailian synth-rock band Mi Sex (its title) and the Normal's "Warm Leatherette" from a year later (disembodied talking about being turned on by car crashes); it's also the only cut that really sounded as robotic as I always imagine Ultravox to sound in my head (i.e., like they want to be machines -- predates Gary Numan too.) Usually albumwide John Foxx's vocals feel more human and less hard to take than I'd have predicted, too, though maybe that's just because yesterday I played the album right after Heaven 17's Penthouse And Pavement from 1981, which has really horrible vocals, mostly spouting seemingly moronic political slogans ("We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thang" was their answer to "One Nation Under A Groove" right?) But I gotta say, there is some real abrasiveness and funk in that LP's synth beats -- reminded me of what certain not-entirely-shitty "industrial" bands on Wax Trax or wherever would start doing a half-decade or so later.

i'm an unabashed heaven 17 fan. i can't lie. was really happy to see them on Solid Gold when i was a teen. but i mostly listened to the 12 inch singles which is where i think they thrived.

i love the first three ultravox albums. a.k.a. the "john foxx era".

xp, actually I should've said that new Red Krayola album is "portraits" of famous people, not "profiles." (Same difference, though.)

i never got into red krayola either. i did buy that mayo thompson reissue that drag city put out on vinyl and i like that a lot. Corky's Debt To His Father.

--So I played United yesterday, in the background while doing dishes, of course, which is how I keep the world at bay, and the music stayed resolutely in the background, though I noticed it going from Prog to Kenny G in the blink of an eye (the dishwater got in my eye so I had to blink). The singer - rather than defining him as "Another Indie Recessive Fellow" I define him less generically as "Guy With A Dull Voice."

(For a person who lives alone I seem to generate plenty of dishes. This is a good thing too, otherwise I would never listen to any actual CDs, would only listen through my computer.)

--Incredibly, Plan B - a present-day British grime guy with singer-songwriter ambitions - qualifies for this thread with his recent UK chart track "Stay Too Long," which is the Garage Of Where Our Parents Used To Park Their Car But Then We Set Up Our Amps And Mics In It rather than the Garage Of Paradise, anyhow the '65 organ-soul-guitar freneticism like the Raiders and the Rascals. Plan B has weak gumless singing which makes him more funny than effective when he warbles, but when he raps and shouts he adds to the music's kick, and is still funny. I need to go review this and rate it high for the Singles Jukebox, since it's the sort of track my colleagues will despise.

Yeah, but what do you think of "Funky Squaredance" on United? I think some people who generally liked the album hated that section. I loved/love it.

I'd have gone with "Smokin' In The Boys Room" too. I didn't know the Tubes had put "punk" into one of their album titles; it's just that they sounded like creep kids acting tough.

Frank, you meant Brownsville Station here, not the Tubes, right?

So I pulled out the Pop's Go!, and I'm actually hearing more Clash (especially on the second side -- "Falling For Carmen," "Legal Tender Love," etc.) than Cheap Trick. Or at least Clashy pub-rock, pretty and punchy, with fairly fluid reggae leanings; "I Want To Touch You" is another reggae thing -- same year Joe Jackson and the Police debuted doing something vaguely similar fwiw, though I'd say those two acts both benefited from bassists who had better chops. The two most blatant hardish powerpop cuts (maybe these are the ones where Scott's hearing Cheap Trick?), I'd say, are "She Really Means That Much To Me" and "Waiting For The Night," though I'd call them more a prefiguring of the poppier side of '80s AOR; first one has a riff that sounds a lot like Rick Springfield. Guess the Babys were doing that sort of thing around the same time too, come to think of it. Trickiest, most modern and electronic arrangements come mostly at the LP's start, though I'd compare "Under The Microscope" and "Shakeaway" more to the Cars, actually, or maybe Tonic For The Troops Boomtown Rats (also 1979), and then "Beat Temptation" reminds me of maybe a rockier version of something off XTC's Drums And Wires (also 1979), but with a cool kind of Eno-disco pulse underneath. The cut that's always stuck with me most, though (think my college radio station played it a lot) is definitely "Go!" itself, for its sweet propulsive jangle (somewhere in the vicinity of the Records' great "Starry Eyes," also 1979) and its heavenly call and response parts. It's a real nice album overall, and yeah, like Scott said, Earle Mankey leaves his Sparksy mark on it. For a supposed L.A. "powerpop" band, they sound fairly eccentric to my ears.

Uh...That Pop album has words, too. Some of which I even took notice of while listening, though they apparently left no lasting impression. Singer's fine, in a new wave AOR pop mode; harmonies sometimes better.

The Tubes Now from 1977 -- again, not really a hard rock album, at least not much until you get to the loud energetic prog jamming in the closing "You're No Fun." And overall, probably too much time spent on showtune/lounge-jazz parodies; blues spoof "Golden Boy," seemingly about a phenom of indeterminate color who can't get a tan, doesn't do much for me. "This Town," about making it in San Francisco I think, and "Pound Of Flesh," about a 90-pound weakling with a long schlong, only slightly better. But they still seem ahead of their time a lot, predating Axl Rose's singing (high-flying vibrato warble when Fee does his "when you come down" part in his "Eight Miles High" interpolation midway through the quitting-cigs-is-hard opener "Smoke {La Vie En Fumer}"); '80s Peter Gabriel (the groove and vocals of "I'm Just A Mess"); early Was (Not Was)/James Chance Ornette-rock (free jazz sax bleats in "Cathy's Clone," though maybe that's why they give "special thanks to Captain Beefheart" on the cover); and most astoundingly, '80s hip-hop turntablists (Side Two opener "God-Bird-Change," a fast sort of fusion collage that goes through all sorts of changes before winding up on an insane extended drum break that sounds like the Incredible Bongo Band before almost turning into "The Mexican"). So basically, sometimes their eclecticism works, and sometimes it doesn't. And you wonder if they're capable of taking anything seriously at all until you remember they wound up doing just that in the '80s, and actually weren't as fun.

Listening to a lot of Armored Saint today, to sort of recontextualize them since they've got a new album (first one in a decade) coming out next month. They were never a metal band, not even on their debut in '84; they were a hard rock band. Their "hit single" from that disc, "Can U Deliver," rewrites the riff from Black Sabbath's "Megalomania" (off Sabotage), and the guitar tones are close to Dio-era Iommi until the solos come in; then they're pure post-Nugent arena rawk, same as the riffs, and vocalist John Bush is an Ian Gillan-style belter. Listening now, I feel like I should have paid more attention in the past.

chuck, you really do need a copy of mongrel. i don't know why you thought it was weak/uneven. such a great album.

The Pop's Go was never like the Babys or even The Records -- except they both worked in pop
-- or I would have liked it more. I still like the debut. The guitars are way louder, the vocals are sneering on at least half of it. And it's a lot more rock 'n' roll. If I had to compare Go to something, it'd be early Sparks. Which I never liked much but there's that Earle Mankey connection.

I used to like Now a lot but it certainly wasn't hard rock. My favorite song on it was a cover, what "My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains." The Tubes pretty much boiled down everything that was good on Now into pastiches and collages which wound up on the double live album -- which did have a fair amount of hard rock on it. They were pretty much sunk in the US at that point. That is until the Talk to You Later hit. They even did a record with Todd Rundgren, a kind of rock opera about TV.

I forget the name of it. Unlistenable, pretty much.

Yeah, so xhuxk's recollection upstream was right. I just didn't like Go! at all. There was an EP that came out after it. It back to straight Hollywood power pop. Had a copy. It was pleasant if nondescript.

I can't believe we're talking about The Pop and not The Knack with the death of Doug Fieger. I though The Pop's debut was as good as Get the Knack -- as far as my tastes go, only harder and more street, which fit the fact that they had to do it themselves without any major label interest. 'Course, it didn't have "My Sharona"
either.

Doug Fieger was also responsible for the Rubber City Rebels' one major label release. Which was actually pretty damn good.

"My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains"

Oh yeah, duh, guess this is more why they thank Beefheart on the cover. Honestly, it didn't even occur to me that it was a cover, though I swear I know at least a little more Beefheart than I know Zappa.

They even did a record with Todd Rundgren, a kind of rock opera about TV. I forget the name of it.

Remote Control from 1979. I still have a copy; apparently thought "Prime Time," "No Way Out," "No Mercy" and "Telecide" made it worth keeping, though it's been a bunch of years since I put it on.

And yeah, Fieger obviously figures into the 1979 powerpop equation more than anyone. In fact, "My Sharona" owned the summer of 1979; people who weren't around yet have no idea. It's like the Knack came out of nowhere and were suddenly the biggest rock band on earth -- when Nirvana came out in 1991, the Knack seemed like the obvious comparison, except I liked Get The Knack more than I'd ever like Nevermind. Anyway, three decades later, and I've still never heard Fieger's old band Sky. Had no idea until now that he was briefly in Triumvirat, in 1974 (at least according to his Wiki, which I just checked.) He was on Was (Not Was)'s second album Born To Laugh At Tornadoes, too ("Smile" and "Betryal"), which also had Ozzy and Mitch Ryder and Mel Torme. Apparently he's on one song on the new Bruce Kulick album, too.

I actually reviewed an Armoured Saint three-song EP as part of the first metal roundup I ever wrote (also featuring: Ratt, Powertrip, and Shrapnel!), for the Voice in 1984. Thought the first eight seconds of the first song, "False Alarm," sounded like "Albatross" by Public Image Ltd. No idea if I was right or not. Don't think I've ever listened to anything by the band since, but maybe I should sometime.

doug fieger was also a part of detroit rock history with his band Sky. (although i don't think it was actually HIS band. he was just a kid. but they put out two major label albums that can be found in dollar bins occasionally.)

http://home.att.net/~s.m.geer/sky.jpg

sky x-post

"In fact, "My Sharona" owned the summer of 1979"

i remember exactly where i was when i first heard it! it was on the radio by the pool where my friend chris's older teenage sister was sunbathing in her bikini. i couldn't stop staring at her. chris didn't like the song. me and his sister both liked it a lot. total teen movie moment.

Frank, you meant Brownsville Station here, not the Tubes, right?

I didn't know what I meant, obviously - but Brownsville Station, of course.</senility>

I personally thought that "Ring My Bell" owned the summer of '79, but now we're off-topic.

And straying only a bit on-topic, my favorite part of that Phoenix alb is the hard-rock guitar that comes a whole hunk of minutes into "Funky Squaredance" - and then the melodies from earlier in the song that repeat after that solo seem to have gathered some beauty along the way, in contrast, even though they'd not hit me earlier. But Phoenix's singing is always a barrier - flattens and drains everything, which can give unity to proceedings that might otherwise sound like no more than hopping and skipping from style to style, but a commitment to each style would make much more impact on me. I get the impression from the Singles Jukebox that some people find the Phoenix so beautiful as to be moved to tears, which I don't comprehend at all though (I suppose) I'd like to have the ears and empathy to do so.

When it came to style rummagers, Arling & Cameron just seemed to have a lot more pizzazz.

So Scott - especially now that we're apparently in a temporary dance-pop phase of Past Expiry Hard Rock -- how come you never told me Ebn Ozn's "Bag Lady (I Wonder)" should totally have made the "100 Best Heavy Metal Singles" appendix in the back of Stairway? Not sure how I never noticed this before, but that's totally a loud rock track --in the Aldo Nova AOR guitars and production, the post-Zep screaming, the melody that keeps slipping into something near "Tales Of Brave Ulysses." (Also pretty sure -- especially given the video for it now on youtube -- that it was also the followup single to "A E I O U Sometimes Y," which, like the rest of their 1984 album, is way more goofy synth-duo novelty pop with rap and maybe electrica salsa touches than rock, even if Trouser Press Record Guide once compared their Swedish chick with cappucino spiel in said vowel song to David Lee Roth. Though "Bag Lady," about a homeless person, was goofy too, of course.)

Also curious whether anybody else who gets CDs in the mail from Smog Veil (Scott and Frank and ???) checked out the Terminal album they sent out late last year by Pistol Whip, who were apparently a Cleveland band between 1976 and 1978. I definitely like it -- every time I play it in the background, there are songs that remind me of the Dictators and the Dolls and the Seeds, but I'm always too busy to note which ones they are. (And Tin Huey's Before Obscurity: The Bushflow Tapes, also on Smog Veil last year, was even better, I thought.)

Or okay, looking at the video (featuring Imogne Coca fwiw) on youtube (which convinces me the song was actually meant to be serious), I'm thinking "Bag Lady" should have at least made my disco-metal appendix -- fast synth-beats underneath are very backstreet leather-bar Hi-NRG. Also, the video version runs 4:26; album mix lasts two minutes longer.

i never got those smog veil releases :((((((((((((((((((((

i liked bag lady a lot, but i was completely obsessed by aeiou. i played that 12 inch a ton when it came out. never bought the album! don't know why. maybe it was just years later when i would see it in dollar bins and by then i just wasn't curious enough. how many songs are on it? did they have to do a lot of padding to get to album length?

speaking of prog-influenced new wave, i've been enjoying Magazine enormously this week. those albums are really hitting me in a good way. in a way that maybe they didn't years ago. never really thought about it, but howard devoto must have been a huge peter hammill fan.

Interesting band called Nadine The Band - well, what's interesting about them is that of the nine acts listed on allmusic as recording a track called "Interesting," only two had their "Interesting" streamed on YouTube, and theirs was the best. It's not on their MySpace, from the sound of which they're a Long Island rock band circa 1978 just discovering this New Wave thing though what they really play is wailing rock. Except they're actually a California band circa right now.

Don't think I received the Pistol Whip; did get the Tin Huey and the Easter Monkeys archival CDs. Latter is glam-art hard rock, not unlike the Electric Eels though not as ferocious or ear-shattering; I like the attitude but the singer did need to stay in tune more. Pretty good anyway. I like the Huey too, also like whatever Ralph Carney albs they send my way, sorta jazz-reggae grabbaggers that manage to avoid the clichés of jazz and reggae.

Easter Monkeys are better and Nadine The Band worse than my descriptions make them seem. I'm listening to "Nailed To The Cross" on the Easter Monkeys alb, good groove and rumble from the bass, and Jim Jones dive-bombing excellently on guitar.

OK, overall that Easter Monkeys album is extremely spotty, and ratty and bare of thread as well, but I do like the spirit.

The Runaways is coming to the art house Laemmle in Pasadena. Was just down there today to see
North Face, something you won't want to see if you demand even slight cheer at the end of your moviehouse investment. So Runaways potential audience is fairly restricted, regardless of reviews. It will rope in some of the retirees because the bargain matinee rate is so good, they'll come to see anything.

This is bit of a 'kick me' placard.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (FEBRUARY 17, 2010) – Trainwreck, fronted by Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass and “Lee of the D” announced today that they will go off the rails this month in support of their latest CD, The Wreckoning.

Trainwreck has been described by Gass as a “cornucopia of rock and a 5-headed hydra of pleasure”. Beginning on February 27, Trainwreck’s classic/prog/Southern boogie wreck and roll extravaganza will head out on tour beginning at Dipiazza’s in Long Beach. Mere days later, the band will cut a swath a mile wide from smoggy Southern California to Sin City and onto the southern United States. After that – they’ll head to the Midwest and back again to the Rocky Mountains. Confirmed tour dates are:

02/27 @ Dipiazza’s, Long Beach, CA
03/01 @ Beauty Bar, Las Vegas, NV
03/02 @ Green Room, Flagstaff, AZ
03/04 @ Launchpad, Albuquerque, NM
03/05 @ VZD, Oklahoma City, OK
03/06 @ The Village, Little Rock, AR
03/07 @ 3rd & Lindsley, Nashville, TN
03/09 @ Vinyl, Atlanta, GA
03/10 @ Workplay Theater, Birmingham, AL
03/12 @ Frankie’s, Toledo, OH
03/13 @ Martyr’s, Chicago, IL
03/14 @ The Basement, Columbus, IL
03/16 @ The Firebird, St. Louis, MO
03/17 @ The Riot Room, Kansas, MO
03/18 @ Larimer Lounge, Denver, CO

“The Wreckoning is nothing short of a Trainwreck, in the best possible way,” said John Barthomew Shredman of Trainwreck. “After seven years of playing music together, touring all over the world, and recording a number of live albums and EP's we finally decided it was time to release our full-length debut. We cannot wait to see all of you on the road in the coming month. So keep your ear-fannies wide and your butt-flaps wider because we're about to ram this train into places you didn't know it could go. Prepareth yourselves!”

The Wreckoning is Trainwreck’s latest 15-song release that features instant classics such as
“Milk The Cobra”, “Bothered & Hot” and “El Mustachio”. All tracks highlight the bands par-tay credo. Case in point, the video for “Brodeo”, a tale of man-on-man ‘bonding’ could very well be the band's manthem. Lyrics touch on the finer points of beer pong, chips and dip and lots of energetic men taking their shirts off at a pool party sans chicks. It’s a visual Broverload to be sure.

Trainwreck’s absurdist comedy stage banter and lyrics are derived from characters they’ve developed within the band; essentially living caricatures of themselves. Never ones to shy away from big guitars (or occasional flute fugues and fantasy), Trainwreck have earned themselves fans all over the globe headlining venues in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. They have supported bands such as Reverend Horton Heat, Vida Blue (Page from Phish), Blues Traveler and have performed on The Jimmy Kimmel Show and Current TV.

ABOUT TRAINWRECK
Trainwreck is: Kyle Gass (aka Klip Calhoun) from Tenacious D, Jason Reed (aka “Lee of the D” & biker hayseed Darryl Donald), John Konesky (aka John Bartholomew Shredman), John Spiker (aka Boy Johnny) and Nate Rothacker (aka Dallas St. Bernard). The band thrives on tours that have occasionally left melted faces, busted ear-fannies and the occasional bastard child in their wake. Their latest release is The Wreckoning.

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With "milk the cobra" seems they're trying for the always elusive like-Turbonegro-but-not-sodomites
thing.

Hole in London last night. Lex was there and said that Courtney delivered a show that was tight, focused, and fierce.

Easter Monkeys album is extremely spotty, and ratty and bare of thread as well, but I do like the spirit

Me too. I also like how the opening cut, "Take Another Pill," is an unabashed "Immigrant Song" rip (reminds me of Heart's "Barracuda" oddly enough), and I've always thought "Underpants" ranks with history's all-time great Fruit Of The Loom odes (though I might actually prefer Cobra Verde's '90s cover version, tbh.) And right, the cranked-up guitar chaos in tracks like "Nailed To the Cross" and "Power" is pretty cool. But yeah, the thing still sounds really murky overall -- which no doubt can be partially attributed to so much of it being recorded live, or onto eight-track analog tape. Mostly, it's just hard to hear the songs.

Not sure if this is the place for this, but thanks to Scott's recommendation I picked up this record in Houston last weekend.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8-9TjeeuxLU/SmmzFSixa2I/AAAAAAAAAYE/RV1Hr_fc2fw/s400/Easta_of_Eden_Front.jpg
Man does it Rock. Maybe this is doesn't fit this thread though, just wanted to say thanks Scott.

my pleasure! love that album.

Lita Ford's Wicked Wonderland isn't what one expects. For a self-release, it gathered an astonishing number of reviews, about 80, on Amazon. Seemingly this was a consequence of old time fans panning it hard and an assembled 'street team' used to astroturf the rating back to mediocrity. If you go out to Amazon, there's a two-peak curve in the review skew. Lots of five stars and an equal number of one star avoids.

This, for example, is standard for the one stars and it is not kind:

Lyrically, this is a sad attempt by two borderline elderly people trying to be sexy and shocking. While the Lita Ford of the 1980's might have gotten away with this if it was done with more talent, the turkey necked, grey haired Lita of 2010 only serves to make these lyrics more revolting.

That's overstated and 'borderline elderly' is just mean. The lyrics of all the songs, which are virtually all one word titles, simply aren't interesting enough, even in a bad way, to pay attention to.

The worst quality of it is the product of Lita's husband, someone who was the singer in Nitro. Nitro? I remember the name, nothing else. Third or fourth tier something-or-other.

They live on an island in the Caribbean and this, for instance, generates songs about sex and one called "Patriotic SOB." This is doing what you know of but if that is personally great but not excitingly or eloquently translated, you get this.

The Nitro guy growls, Lita sings, all on tunes that are basically one riff vamps with sequencers
adding seasoning. It's a fairly lazy approach to composition since sequencing tools are supposed to help you write songs -- that's the philosophy in something like Roger Linn's Adrenalinn -- not dictate
all the songs on an album length. Even if you are going for a semi-industrial vibe which Wicked Wonderland dabbles in. It's really not an industrial record, though. Lita Ford still sounds too nice and 80's arena for that.

There is a lot of good to great arena rock guitar on it but most of it is not memorable after you listen.

The title cut is fair to good as is the kickoff number. In a few other places it sounds like some of the Ted Nugent songs you can't remember from Love Grenade, either. Not bad but ...

Love is blind and that's the only reason one can think of for LF to have made this. It's not quite as good as her first two Lita Ford Band albums, records which were serviceable hard rock but really short on things to remember, except for the song "Dancing on the Edge."

Plus, it has CD disease. It's too long, too much, needed a hefty edit.

Not as poor as old Cherie Currie albums. Not as good as And Now ... The Runaways which was pretty mediocre. Not as good as anything in her old catalog. Some extra points for trying the elusive quality of 'growth' on for size. I would imagine you wouldn't hear much from this in any tours she does in the hinterland ag show circuit.

Well, on Twitter I said "She can still play, but she still can't sing, and the production's more Rob Zombie than Runaways." Then I got paid to interview her (nice lady) and wrote this piece. I haven't revisited the album since writing the story, though I do have some of her earlier stuff in my iPod.

it has CD disease. It's too long, too much, needed a hefty edit.

Ha ha -- Well, pretty sure there was an advance promo EP that circulated several months before the album. (Though unfortunately, I could barely make it through the EP, either.)

That was a nice interview, Phil, handled with a deft touch.

When I read the reviews on Amazon I expected to hear something like Stuck Mojo -- which I actually like. But I didn't feel it had much in the way of a nu-metal feel and -- like said -- the industrial was pretty light. I'll probably listen to it some more but doubt it will make a difference. For something heavy it felt ephemeral and tossed off although they probably don't believe they tossed it off. She probably do with being less isolated for the next kick at the can. Music to sell boutique porn store kit to is a market but a little too niche.

Still sampling old Mink Deville LPs when I can find them for a buck (see last year's thread), and turns out his/their self-titled debut from 1977 is by far the best one I've come across, and I suspect that I'm likely to come across. Also the hardest rocking, thanks to "One Way Street," "Gunslinger," "Cadillac Walk" (later done by Moon Martin), and "She's So Tough," which variously find their grooves in the vicinity of louder Velvet Underground stuff, John Lee Hooker, and the Shadows Of Knight's "Gloria." "One Way Street" also has Willy Deville screeching in a convincing high register somewhere midway between John Fogerty and Nazareth's Dan McCafferty. But best/most memorable song is still "Spanish Stroll," which starts out with a Lou Reed talk rhythm then turns into a bilingual walk through the barrio. Whole thing is very Lower East Side obsessed, too, from opener "Venus of Avenue D" on.

From around '87.

http://www.dickdestiny.com/b52paintingsm.JPG

http://dickdestiny.com/S_Air_C_by_Dick_Destiny_and_the_Highway_Kings.mp3

Phil -- WTF? How can you say that armored saint were never a metal band? Symbol of Salvation and Revelation are undeniably metallic, even if they have some hard rock flourishes.

Armored Saint has to be metal, as they were always on the "Ma Ma Ma Ma Metalshop" radio show back in the 80s. Doesn't matter who else they would be interviewing, they would always be playing some live Armored Saint stuff.

Some tuff gurls:

Genya Ravan And I Mean It (Mainman 1979) Her second and highest-charting (#106) and I think last album; never heard the first, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never listened to a Ten Wheel Drive album. She was 27 (born in 1942) when it came out, though Christgau calls her “teen-identified” for some reason. Starts out very hot, with “Pedal To Metal,” about getting the hell out of dodge in the time of hairspray cans, and sounding like Suzi Quatro making an early Patti Smith move. Never matches that again, though goofy rocking boogie-woogie of “Roto Root Her” on Side Two comes closest. Otherwise, hard rock guitars are only intermittent; I’d say the sensibility here is as much Bette Middler bath-house cabaret nostalgia for early ‘60s girl-groups and doo-woppers, as filtered through Ellen Foley on Meat Loaf’s first album maybe; “I Won’t Sleep On The Wet Spot No More” goes into a undisguised surprise disco break in the middle just like Loaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light,” but still isn’t as funny or provocative as its title pretends it is. And in general Ravan signals her belting way too much to actually put the lyrics over; there’s this late ‘70s Noo Yawk white-person identification with old soul music she doesn’t nearly have the vocal finesse for. (Actually, Mink Deville has that problem too – a soul trio called the Immortals backs up some of his debut, but those are some of the record’s most fast-forwardable parts.) Still like this better than the Foley LP I found last year, though. Ballad duet with Ian Hunter that starts Side Two, “Junkman” (not to be confused with Patti Labelle and the Blue-Belles’ 1962 “Sold My Heart To The Junkman” I don’t think) isn’t great but isn’t bad either. Same goes for most of the rest.

Karen Lawrence & The Pins Girls’ Night Out (RCA, 1981) Yeah, her of 1994, making a new wave move, still Jack Douglas produced but even less hard rock than that band’s second album. More campy turn of the ‘80s girl-group-era nostalgia in the LP cover prom-dress packaging, in the okay cover of Bryan Hyland’s “Sealed With A Kiss,” and maybe in the hairspray mentions in “Blondes,” the shortest and probably catchiest song, about how girls who use hydrogen peroxide have more fun than Karen. But mostly what she’s doing here is diving whole hog into operatic vibrato Lene Lovich hiccup warble mode, which works best when the music gets similarly dance-oriented and herky-jerky, in “I Won’t Stop” and the Sparksy “March of the Pins” (about cities filled with blind conformists, though less drab than that sounds.) Title track is in the tradition of the hundreds of other “Girls Night Out” songs of several genres once discussed somewhere on this board (one of which was the one by Precious Metal, which was better than Karen’s is.) But I’d estimate half the album is more watered-down corporate adult contemporary new wave, maybe toward what the Motels or Til Tuesday started hitting with a year or four later, though their hits had more hooks. So a marginal keeper, at best.

Fanny Rock And Roll Survivors (Casablanca, 1974) By far my favorite of these three, and given that it’s their fifth album, I was under the impression they should have been washed up by then. Don’t think that anymore. Impressed by how committed to funk they are, but it sounds like their biggest funk influence is, uh, Uriah Heep, judging from Nicole Barclay’s keyboards in the almost-disco “Beggar Man” and fancy “Rock ‘n’ Roll Survivors” (about still being around after five albums, I guess, when all those other rock’n’rollers died with needles in their arms.) In “Rockin’ (All Nite Long),” probably the heaviest cut (and one of four songwrite-credited to Suzi Quatro’s sister Patti, who’d apparently just joined on guitar – drummer Brie Howard was new too I gather), Barclay sounds more like she’s going for a Jon Lord sound. “I’ve Had It” is real hooky la-la-la glam rock, not far from what Suzi was debuting with the same year. (Jasper/Oliver actually list this album as ’75, but the cover says ’74.) Two covers – Stones’ “Let’s Spend The Night Together” (which they harmonize sexily enough but too many other people have done it so who cares) and the Jaynetts’ pre-psych 1963 girl-group classic “Sally Go Round The Roses,” which might be the most danceable thing here. They do that one with no irony at all, fortunately -- smart, since it’s a devastating song. But the best known track on the album – and one of the more memorable, actually – is “Butter Boy,” which is all burlesque come-on: More Bette Midler camp, in other words (written by bassist Jean Millington, who’d later marry Earl Slick apparently. Her sister, guitarist June, was no longer in the band, maybe already headed toward her lesbian folk career.) “Butter Boy” was actually Fanny’s biggest pop hit – went #29, where “Charity Ball” had peaked at #40 in 1971. And “I’ve Had It” got to #79, which makes this the only Fanny album with two Hot 100 hits, although the album itself didn’t chart. It was their last one.

Uh, wait: 1979 - 1942 = 37, not 27. (Is that possible? '42 is what Joel Whitburn lists, anyway. Which makes Xgau calling her teen-identified even more perplexing.)

And actually, according to Wiki, she would have been 39: "Genya Ravan, aka Goldie Zelkowitz (born Genyusha Zelkowitz, April 19, 1940, in Łódź, Poland) is an American rock singer and producer. She is the former lead singer of The Escorts, Goldie & the Gingerbreads, and Ten Wheel Drive.
Genyusha Zelkowitz arrived in the USA in 1949, accompanied by her parents and one sister. She had two brothers, who died. These were the only family members who had survived the Nazi Holocaust in Europe."

Supposedly, in the '60s, Goldie & The Gingerbreads were the first all-female rock band signed to a major label. (Fanny were just the second.) I've never heard them. They were around from 1962 to 1967, according to Wiki, and then Ravan was in Ten Wheel Drive from 1968 to 1974.

Bug ugh for Fanny's Rock n Roll Survivors. It was done at a time when it wanted to be more hard rock and thought it was more hard rock than old Fanny and could have been more hard rock and wasn't.

I've had it on a couple times, can't listen to it all the way through.

The Rundgren-produced Mother's Pride which was the last by the working band was as close as they came to a glam record. They'd been on tour with Slade in Britain. It was the album that rocked the most, too.

The rest of the guitarly interesting material with women singing loud and bashing is about evenly spread between the third, Fanny Hill, and the second, Charity Ball. Charity Ball is a bit of a boogie but it doesn't tear loose like the men were doing at the same time and part of the blame for this lays with producer Richard Perry who wanted them to be a pop group above all else. He really often killed the guitars.

The albums are good song wise but they gravitate toward a sophisticated California sound, like the band would be good to back a Barbara Streisand rock album without causing upset. It was a pretty conservatie approach and it hurt them, I think.

The Rhino Handmade Box lays it all out. One of my favorite box sets, actually, because of the story and span of material.

I so want to like Lita Ford. I liked several of her old albums, she always seems compelling in interviews, and I once publicly offered to write lyrics for her so she wouldn't have to sing "I'm a spider monkey, baby" like a moron. She never took me up on it. But Wretched Wonderland is far, far and away the most godawful embarrassment of a record I heard last year. I'd rather listen to porn with the picture off. Graceless, brainless, gutless, ludicrous. The ringtones on my 2-year-old daughter's toy phones are better written. It's too long, yes, but there's no amount of shorter that would make it any better, so what does it matter?

Also, I'm late on this, but I thought last year's Magnum album, Into the Valley of the Moonking, was a marginal improvement on Princess Alice and the Broken Arrow, and thus a reason for some hope that they aren't quite done. In their prime they were probably my favorite Hard Rock band.

on the "Ma Ma Ma Ma Metalshop" radio show back in the 80s.

yeah! another 'm-m-m-m-m-METALSHOP bbbbzzzzzrrrrrpppaaaaqoowwwwWWWW!!!!' fan!

leave it to earlnash. i loved that show. that was some pretty rad shit for mainstream FM radio, even if it was on a Sunday night at 10 PM. I remember hearing the early Accept like "Fast As a Shark" on that show, Exodus, I think I even remember some interview with Jon Bon Jovi where they asked him his favorite formative influences (and this is like in the area of "Runaway") and he said 'Tokyo Tapes' by the Scorpions (live versh of "We'll Burn the Sky" specifically...) And I'm like 'Tokyo Tapes' what the hell is that? I thought they were a new band on the scene, and only knew about "No One Like You."

Yeah, I used to see Armored Saint on MuchMusic's "Power Hour", so that would appear to make 'em metal, even though that program's definition of "metal" was kinda elastic. (They aired Styx' "Heavy Metal Poisoning" once; plus, when Michael Williams (the black guy) filled in for J.D. "John" Roberts as host, he'd make a point of playing "Let's Go Crazy" or "Rock Box" or Xavion.)

So, speaking of Canada, anybody here have any thoughts about TROOPER?? Got Thick As Thieves from 1978, produced by Randy Bachman, for a buck at Breakaway a month or two ago and didn't know what to expect. Pretty sure I used to get them mixed up with Triumph, and Trillion, and Toronto, and Tycoon. (I know who Triumph are now; still hazy on the other three.) Put the album (their fourth I believe) on, and "Live From The Moon" was a rocker -- Popoff calls it pomp but I say it's a good Who rip. But then the next seven songs weren't hard rock at all -- more like soft-rock/yacht-rock, if anything. Nice groove, a lot of the time, but a very easy one, with definite occasional disco leanings. There's a couple blue-eyed soulish things that reminded me of Lavender Hill Mob; "Round Round We Go" had harmony parts right out of "Ventura Highway"; "Drivin' Crazy" tried a Latin rhythm on; "The Moment That It Takes" was a brainlessly generic power ballad that could have been done by Elton John in the late '70s or a hair-metal band in the late '80s or Rascal Flatts in the '00s. (For some reason it gets a slightly different copyright on the inner sleeve, so maybe it was contracted for a movie or something.) And then, finally, second-to-last song on the album, they start rocking again -- "Gambler," maybe midway between early Loverboy and late '70s Bob Seger. And then they do "Raise A Little Hell," a knucklehead party shout that I totally remembered hearing a lot on Detroit radio 30 years ago, and hadn't thought about since. #59 pop hit, Whitburn says, only time a Trooper single charted in the U.S. Worth keeping for that track alone, but still kinda weird.

Popoff seems to say that their debut album, from '75, was heaviest and best, and then they turned consistently mediocre, with occasional sparks of glory. Jasper and Oliver say Trooper "won a reputation for delivering hard-hitting metal of above-average standards" (they're so quotable!), then got more AOR commerical in the '80s. Who's right?

as i think i said on the vinyl board, i wore "raise a little hell" OUT when i was a kid. but i would never actually play the whole album. just that song over and over and over like a lunatic. that was my anthem when i was 11 or 12. that and "hair of the dog". and "hold your head up".

Debut was the most rocking. Had a boogie about roller-skating called forthrightly enough,
"Roller Rink," which is very good. Plus the obscure favorite, "General Hand Grenade." They definitely look like rockers and are high energy on it. Later they made themselves tame and scored the hit you wrote of which also was aired in Pennsy rather a lot. So that generated traction everywhere.

Pulled "Santa Maria" from 1976 (and from Two For The Show) only other Trooper record I've got, down from the 45 shelf, and thought it was disappointing, especially given how glammy two Troopers look on its sleeve (unless those are groupies -- hard to tell.) Basically it's a middling seafaring choogle, like they were trying to do their version of "Ride Captain Ride" by Blues Image, but couldn't really pull it off.

I guess you could rate that with The Stampeders. Trooper lagged April Wine, Chilliwack. Weren't as good as Helix would sound. Not quite up to going toe to toe with Max Webster/Kim Mitchell. More noticeable in the States than Goddo ever was.

Bigger impression than Thundermug. I think Thundermug's Orbit is an incredible early Seventies hard rock record. Everything and the kitchen sink is in it. Nada.

Spun a couple times my new old $1 copy of the '77 self-titled debut by Detective, who George discussed some upstream, and determined my favorite tracks are probably the fairly ferocious Zep Zerox "Grim Reaper," surprisingly tasty midtempo opener "Recognition" (where I always think Michael Des Barres is saying "red condition" instead), and the very funky "Wild Hot Summer Nights," more evidence that plenty of metallish bands around that time had zero qualms about being accused of "going disco" -- sounds like they're aiming for Ohio Players or the Family Stone, only louder than "Fopp" even, and they do it to it. (Worth mentioning maybe that bassist Bobby Pickett is a black guy, and that all five of 'em looked dressed up real fancy like they're ready to hit the disco floor on the back cover.) Rest of the album rocks the piano some ("Detective Man," guitar riff stolen from somewhere obvious I can't place -- keyboardist is Tony Kaye via Yes), fulminates real purty some ("Deep Down"), gets noisy some ("One More Heartache"), and gets cumbersome sometimes when it gets too bloozy. Still, mostly good.

Popoff compares it to Physical Graffiti, Humble Pie, Lone Star (who I haven't heard since I wrote Stairway I just realized), and post-Hunter Mott, but seems to like their followup from a year later more. I'll play that one soon too, I guess. Oliver and Jasper call them "incredibly heavy" and claim they "have the heaviest drum sound bar anyone except John Bonham," which overstates the case a bit.

love this album:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KcJj6wN1MA4/Ro8DDF56ODI/AAAAAAAAAO4/V_ZDFaIRMTk/s400/copperhead.jpg

Detective did have a 'disco' look. Even moreso on the second. Tonly Kaye, I think, used to joke that being in silver was his baked potato thing.

The Live at Atlantic one reveals some Faces vibe going on, particularly on a song called "Help Me Up" which might have been on the second. "Got Enough Love" also has some Zep stuff, although it probably hearkens more to Silverhead's 16 & Savaged style. For Silverhead, des Barres was glam. For Detective, he's urbane city man-about-town. Both bands only got to two albums, so it was six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Man, just played Good Rats' From Rats To Riches from 1978 again, first time in a year and a half, and I'm sorry George, I fucking LOVE that album - especially "Taking It To Detroit," "Mr. Mechanic," "Don't Hate The Ones Who Bring You Rock & Roll," and "Local Zero." Suddenly I want to start looking for all their other records. We were talking about possible U.S. equivalents of Max Webster upthread, and I swear, judging from this album, these guys probably fit the bill as much as Crack the Sky do. Plus, like Max Webster (and unlike Crack The Sky), they never charted in Billboard! Still want somebody to tell me what the deal is with their namedrop of Twisted Sister in that "...Rock & Roll" song. Also seems interesting that the album came out on Passport -- wasn't that mainly the house label for import distributor Jem? Based in South Plainfield, I know, but still seems exotic for a bunch of butt-ugly Long Island dudes. (Probably there were other Middle Atlantic acts on the imprint, but if so they're slipping my mind right now.) Anyway, here's what I wrote about the album in 2008; still rings true from here:

Rolling Hard Rock 2008 Thread

Good Rats and Twisted Sister ALWAYS played the same clubs near me growing up. They were everywhere. I'm sure they were on the same bills together not only in connecticut and across the border into new york, but also in long island and jersey. NRBQ and Max Creek were the other big bar bands near me, but Good Rats definitely had their tri-state cult.

passport was owned by jem and had a deal with sire. i think? they went bankrupt.

and passport had a deal with charisma in the u.k., i think. and maybe harvest? i know they licensed a lot of u.k. stuff.

that pezband album i bought is on passport. all their albums are. they seem atypical considering the passport roster of brand x, synergy, fm, etc.

though they did end up putting out a lot of new wave in the 80's. all my fave human sexual response records, for instance.

Chuck, if you ever see the Random Hold comp that Passport put out, you should get it. it has stuff from their u.k. album and EP - and it's probably easier to find. very cool post-punk/prog produced by Peter Hammill. i don't know why they haven't had some sort of nerd revival by now. they were cool.

Speaking of could-be nerd revivals, I'm kind of obsessed with this 1981 Credit In Heaven double album I got by Minneapolis Twin/Tone band the Suburbs for 50 cents at a Goodwill here a few weeks ago -- even though the vinyl's sort of warped, so I can't play the first track and a half on any of the four sides! Anyway, I'd call their sound sort of post-punk funk with prog and even Contortiony no wave tendencies -- a stretch for this thread, but I swear, if they'd come from the Lower East Side they'd be legends by now. Also interesting that they beat both their fellow funk-punks the Minutemen and fellow Minnesotans Husker Du to the double-LP deal by three whole years. I'm not gonna claim the individual songs are sinking in, but they have a really cool frantic groove regardless, even despite some kinda haughty Anglofoppish vocal affectations. And I've never heard anybody mention them, not for the past quarter century at least. (Ira Robbins likes them in an old Trouser Press guide book I have, though. And Christgau gave their In Combo LP from 1980 an A-, but this one only a B-.) Actually who they kind of remind me then of is The Embarrassment, from Kansas.

...And actually maybe remind me even more of Philly's Bunnydrums (who George wrote about for me once at the Voice).

"And I've never heard anybody mention them, not for the past quarter century at least."

i have! on ilm at least. and there are other fans here. i need that album that you got. don't have it. love is the law was their big college hit and that's when i first heard them. bought that album at the time.

they were slicker by love is the law though.

I adored "Love Is the Law", too, but yeah, it's much more mainstream than Credit in Heaven. I think of the Suburbs in with the Swimming Pool Qs, Translator and (early) The Call...

it was only a couple of years ago that i finally heard the first translator album! heartbeats and triggers. i really like that album. i only knew THEIR big college hit "everywhere that i'm not". but that album is way weirder than that song. there are even, like, industrial post-punk moments on that album! very cool.

they were part of the 415 records crowd.

do we have a 415 records tribute thread? the nuns, the mutants, pearl harbor & the explosions, new math, the units, romeo void, wire train, red rockers, pop-o-pies. they don't make labels like that one anymore.

xpost

You just crushed me out of an explication on why the Good Rats ... were good. But they never made any albums as good as Silverhead's [i]16 & Savaged[i] or Detective's two.

It's not just being smart.

Smart is annoying when it dances too much beyond love of hard rock,
becoming only an instrument of contempt and satire. It's a very fine line -- it's hard to know when you've crossed it -- but -- every listener knows it when you've screwed it up.

However, Detective's two albums are what this thread was made for.

Unselfconscious funky hard rock, very heavy half of the time, urbane but greasy at a time critics would look back upon and say punk rock was hip over everything, exaggerating what was actually the condition.

This is so elusive a description, it slips through the fingers like mercury.

gorge, do you have that copperhead album? everyone needs that album. i like it way better than any silverhead. i always wanted to like silverhead more than i do. but i haven't played their 2nd album in a long long time. i should play it. every dollar bin has a detective album in it! anyone can be a fan.

No I don't. I've always wanted to hear it.

ILX swallowed my answer to the incoherent rubbish I just posted.

Detective's two albums are funky hard rock, hard to get accepted for after Humble Pie. Nothing immediately radio friendly on either of them but good songwriting nevertheless. It's enthusiastic
crunching rock and roll -- with classic Stonesy-Faces barrel house piano.

The Good Rats were like the Dictators without the craft to write classic American rock songbook tunes. Plus, they didn't have Ross the Boss. Ross the Boss is one of the ultimate American lead guitarists,
always spectacular, never in any band where the tunes pushed over the top. Everything the Good Rats did was elliptical.

with this 1981 Credit In Heaven double album I got by Minneapolis Twin/Tone band the Suburbs for 50 cents at a Goodwill here a few weeks ago -- even though the vinyl's sort of warped, so I can't play the first track and a half on any of the four sides! Anyway, I'd call their sound sort of post-punk funk with prog and even Contortiony no wave tendencies

Christ, I had all this immediately when I was doing a fanzine at Lehigh. It was difficult to swallow with a smile.

Flee, flee!

The Suburbs ate it entirely with respect to this thread. They were not the fluid of Milwaukee's
finest.

If you were there, you initially thought they were cool. Really. I did. Until I heard an album
of it. Fuck me, I'd rather hear 60 minutes of Louie, Louie.

There was a lot of stuff on Twin-Tone which I bought religously. More fool me -- or a reflection
of how much many were desiring more humanity and backbone in their hard rock.

My ex-wife might have liked the Suburbs. That could also be slander.

I think Twisted Sister borrowed the Good Rats' drummer at some point. Joe Franco.

the nuns, the mutants, pearl harbor & the explosions, new math, the units, romeo void, wire train, red rockers, pop-o-pies. they don't make labels like that one anymore

OTM. I only loved half the records here. My ex-wife liked the other half. Me: the Nuns ( I thought that was Posh Boy), Pop-O-Pies, Red Rockers and Pearl Harbour.

415 put out the first nuns single/ep. in 78 or 79.

Ha, my wife and I just had a discussion the other morning about how we can get ahold of a copy of the Pop-O-Pies' White EP, with "The Catholics Are Attacking" and those two "Truckin'" covers and the song about donuts with extra grease for the chief of police on it, before they went and turned into Faith No More. Not sure why I ever got rid of my copy in the first place. Will keep you posted. Still do have Pearl Harbour and the Explosions' album of course though. (Plus Pearl's first solo album.) Also should mention to Glenn that I've listened to the CD reissue of the first Swimming Pool Q's album twice this month. Not hard rock at all, but I like that too. Way more than their later album with, uh, a horse on the cover I think that I found a copy a couple years back. (Also, yeah, I was going to make a Good Rats/Dictators comparison myself before George did, and didn't get around to it. The Good Rats obviously don't survive that one-on-one well. Then again, who would?)

(The Mutants I know were the Detroit ones, who did "So American" where they quoted Steve Miller on cheeseburgers. Were they on 415, though?)

Anglofoppish vocal affectations[i]

Re the Suburbs, perfect reason to lift the needle, since they weren't actually as good as genuine Anglo-fopps. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel come to mind. The Suburbs never made records as good as [I]The Psychomodo or "Judy Teen" or "Man It Was Mean". And those weren't exactly top tier.

Busier maybe. Busy has never grabbed me.

I'd have to say the demographic searching for it liked Audience's House On the Hill a lot more, too.

i was a big fan of the self-titled swimming pool q's record, bought it on cassette and played it until my college roommates said 'turn that shit off, we want to get laid sometime'

http://www.boikot-underground.com/images/Ac-dc_Flick_of_the_Switch.jpg

this really has to be considered the last *great* AC/DC record (although I like all of them since then, I am a life-long diehard.)

'Flick of the Switch' is SO much better than 'For Those About To Rock'. FTATR has like nothing except the of course majestic title track. But the rest? filler. 'Flick of the Switch' -> whole first side is amazing, no filler. Last time that you could ever say that about an AC/DC album side. "Rising Power" an awesome first-track. Then "This House Is On Fire" comes on which is basically a Rolling Stones track. Listening to it again now, I realize why the AC/DC guys bristle at being called a 'heavy metal' band by various journalists. In their mind, they've always been a "rock and roll" band. and "This House Is On Fire" totally affirms that, just a Stonesy-rocker (just with a way-more rigid drum track than Watts would have done.)

"Flick of the Switch" is an incredible single, better than that overblown "For Those About to Rock". and then .. "Nervous Shakedown". wow, what a track. This album was basically my first real introduction to AC/DC. I sorta knew who they were? I was 11 in 1983. After listening to CKLW for most of my life, I was slowly venturing into the rock stations like WRIF, WLLZ, and WIOT (Toledo, Ohio). I think it was WIOT in Toledo that caned the fuck out of "Nervous Shakedown" in 1983. Man, that song scared me , it sounded so heavy and insanely menacing, at least for mainstream rock radio anyway. Bought the 'Flick of the Switch' album, it's been a perennial fave ever since. I'm not gonna say it's the last *great* AC/DC album -- I think 'Blow Up Your Video' is a contender -- but man, it rules.

ha, I see where I said this was the last great one and then that 'Video' could be in the mix. Well, I do love them both. This is probably better than 'Video', just because the production is so crisp, live, and amazing on 'Flick of the Switch'. For 'Video', they went back to Vanda and Young which seemingly would be an awesome move, but there is something kinda flat about it to me. Although, I own 'Flick' on LP and I own 'Video' on CD. I need to get the LP of the latter, i think..

in any case, 'Video' was like 10 times better than 'Fly on the Wall'

oh , the other cool thing is that, on the vinyl at least, Atlantic used the old school R&B label logo, just like they did on all of the J. Geils Band LPs

surgery EP on circuit records. really digging it. chuck must have reviewed it for creem metal, right?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5hZizn5Q1tM/SrF_jQeqxFI/AAAAAAAAA4E/8NLUcampH_M/s200/R-458978-1148643564.jpg

(Continuing the non-hard-rock SPQ digression: the one with the horse was Blue Tomorrow, their third. I hate half of the songs, and the other half are my favorite SPQs things by far. The self-titled one was the second, Deep End was the first. I love them when they went for drama, hated them when they went for twang. Anne Richmond Boston had an underrated solo album at some point, too.)

(Oh, and Guadalcanal Diary, they're another band in that group for me.)

Bunch of things:

Had no idea people felt so passionately about the Suburbs, both pro-and con-. I figured everybody would just say "who??" Shows what I know. Anyway, George is probably right about the them not being as good as Cockney Rebel (I've only heard one album by each in my life, I think, so I'm not much of a judge), but I was probably at least a little off on the Anglofop crack. They sure look like Anglofops, at least on the back cover, but sounds like the Suburb singer is going more for a David Byrne deadpan, the more I listen, and I'm guessing Talking Heads must've influenced their funk proclivities at least a little. (They both sing about women's hips, too.) But George is definitely right about the "busy" part. At least on the album I got, they have a real prog/art-rock conception of "funkiness" -- musically, it actually reminds me of the Tubes' funk moves quite sometimes. I like it the same way. As for Glenn's comparisons, I think I get now why he mentioned the Call -- it's possible I've only ever heard two Call songs (never gave them any thought at all -- were they any good??), but one was "The Walls Come Down," and the Suburbs have this song "Faith" that not only sounds similar but actually features the repeated line "The walls come tumbling down," two years before the Call one. Just saying. (I've never heard the later, slicker stuff that Scott and Glenn say they hit with, unless I heard it and didn't know it.)

International Discography Of The New Wave lists two different bands called the Mutants. The SF ones who were on 415 are different than the Detroit ones whose "So American" 7-inch I used to own and like.

The song I remember liking a lot on Flick Of The Switch back in the '80s (when I used to own it) was "Bedlam And Belgium," though I'm not sure I'd say the same today. Did think that was an okay album at the time. Also kinda loved "Let's Get It Up" off Those About To Rock and "Sink The Pink" off Fly On The Wall once upon a time.

Deep End is the Swimming Pool Q's album I like; Blue Tomorrow struck me as meh. I may well prefer their twang to their drama.

Anybody care about Kevin Coyne? Eccentric British guy, early '80s. The one album I have, In Living Black And White from 1973, is a live one; his guitarist plays pretty loud rock, though his band doesn't much -- come closest in "Eastbourne Ladies" and "Mummy," maybe. He has a Joe Cocker growl that occasionally sounds a little Ian Hunter, but he doesn't seem to have much in the way of tunes. (Maybe the studio albums are more tuneful, I dunno.) Sings about insane asylums (used to work in one according the liner notes), suicidal fat girls, burning down the world with turpentine, America being a land of disease, and British class stuff I don't understand much. Don't know what to make of the guy.

Oops, early '70s I meant for Coyne, not '80s. (At least the stuff I know of.)

Uh...just noticed that the loud guitarist is Andy Summers, six years before the Police's debut album. (Wiki says John Lydon was also a fan.)

oh yeah, big fan of the Coyne. saw him at a small club in Chicago just a couple years before his death. he's quirky. I like his take on things. the working in the insane asylum apparently had a huge effect on him, because yeah it's one of his big themes. and yeah, Andy Summers was in his band for a while. I dig his solo stuff but it's not usually all that "rocking". Better to check out the two Siren LPs, on Elektra in the states. TOTALLY rocking.

(uh, Siren being the band that he was lead singer for, before going solo)

I was listening to the Kevin Coyne & Siren box, from John Peel's Dandylion label, last night. It's almost all old country blues, R&B and late Sixties pub boogie. Definitely a bit of a very poor man's Joe Cocker voice wise. Makes up for it with storytelling and lyrics. Some of it's very country folk blues idiom, intimate and approachable. "Ze Ze Ze Ze" is something to hear in a bar room.

There are a couple old videos of festival and Beeb appearances on YouTube. "Strange Locomotion", from a Rainbow show shows a young Summers on guitar. It's stomping Brit R&boogie. "Eastbourne Ladies" -- which is the song Rotten liked -- is another boogie, performed in front of a festival audience in the Sevenites. More boogie with the guys and gals bopping in a polite hippies we're-having-a-party-in-Blighty
way. Camera pans back to show it's next to a pasture, the cows grazing unperturbed. Coyne has a pair of Walter Brennan 'real McCoy' farm pants on, humps a pole a little. This was back when you could look real crappy and the crowd loved you for it.

"House On the Hill" is a compelling country folk whine about what a local insane asylum is like. Really captures a bleak part of English life. That's from a solo double album, "Marjory Razorblade" which I've not yet digested in its entirety.

andy summers does good stuff on that one double album by The Animals. Love Is. he got around back then.

i think i had one bad kevin coyne album experience and never looked for anything else. this was years ago. and years ago i used to confuse him with kevin ayers. now, kevin ayers, i know i like.

i think the album i had was matching head and feet. which also had andy summers on it. maybe i'd like it now.

"Eastbourne Ladies" is def a high point. Coyne's whining nasal voice in a kind of "Highway 61 Revisited" thing, except about high class dames who look nice. Do they go to bed wearing crowns?

"Holiday in Spain" is a spoof on Brit package holidays to the title country, flamenco beat, the Spaniard waiting on the table looks like a gangster from an evil side of town. "Jackie and Edna" about going to some dire British shore resort, pining for someone in an adulterous affair.

"Marlene" classic rock boogie with a central 'like a rolling stone' organ -- along with "Eastbourne Ladies," one of the recording's party shuffle tunes amid the desperate thin screams and folk blues. A lot of it this has an off Van Morrison quality. I think Ian Hunter was probably a fan as there's a 'stocks and shares' line in "Nasty" which sounds like it was pinched for Mott the Hoople. "Nasty" talks about his wife or girlfriend who makes him wear a dress, perhaps figuratively rather than literally.

Quite a good album as a sometimes taste. Coyne gets the country folk blues complaints going, always follows after awhile with a thumping piece of R&B pub rock, like "Chicken Wing."

It would be a hard person who wouldn't break out laughing during "Karate King," 'his white and muscled flexing at all the passing girls, smashing his way through the window frame, ripping apart his mother's pearls -- they're lieing on the dressing table ... Chop! Chop!"

"If you see the Karate King. Help him! Help him! Comment on his pommaded hair, tell him he would have been an excellent kamikaze pilot in the Second World War! That's what he wants to hear ... in the gymnasium."

Priceless, really.

"Good Boy" --- "Good boy! Good boy! Well done! Good boy! You're just a lickspittle! Lickspittle! Lickspittle! Lickspittle!"

Know we know why Johnny Rotten liked this. Entire portions of the record tear at the British class and compartmentalization thing. One understands immediately why Coyne could never have any significant number of fans in the US.

I'd pay real money to see someone perform "Good Boy" and "Karate King" before a country festival audience at an ag fair.

I have to say xhuxk and stormy bringing up Kevin Coyne has serendipitously been a fine thing. I'm enjoying this stuff and I literally had no idea.

Glad to be of service -- though now I've clearly got some Coyne catching-up to do myself.

And now another '70s cult act (except maybe in their own country, where I get the idea they were a lot bigger than "cult") whose live album that I've got I suspect doesn't stack up to studio LPs I don't have: Gasolin', from Denmark. Been playing their 1976 double-live Sadan, and while you never doubt that the spirit is there, given the loose playing on-stage and less-than-stellar recording it's not so easy to figure out how well-formed or even rocking the songs are. They definitely liked rock'n'roll, back to the '50s variety: you can detect subliminal Chuck Berry influences here and there, and they cover Little Richard's "Keep A Knockin'." Yet there's no doubt they're a '70s arena band in sound -- just not sure whether that means glam, prog, boogie, or what. The fact that they mostly sing in a foreign language doesn't help the issue much; in fact, who they mostly remind me of is that East German band from the same time, Puhdys, who were known to do entire albums of '50s oldies on occasion. At least a couple of songs eventually click, though -- the medley of "Fi-Fi Dong/Inga, Katinka Og Smukke Charlie Pa Sin Harley" (catchiest thing on the record I think, and one of two originals with "Charlie" in the title) could be their equivalent of Chris Spedding's "Motor Bikin'". And "Refrainet Er Frit" on the fourth side convinces me they were most likely Slade fans -- they look pretty darn salt-of-the-earth backstage on the back cover, too. I get the idea more songs might sink in if I gave it more time.

Christgau gave their self-titled LP from the same year (which apparently came out in the States on Epic) an A-, but he mentions "the musicianship and symphonic textures of Yurropean technopomp," which I'm not hearing so much of on the live one -- the arrangements feel big enough, but not quite complex or majestic to read "prog" to my ears, not even in say a Golden Earring sense, though that band might still be another point of comparison. (Jasper/Oliver call Gasolin' "a strange mixture of hard rock -- early '70s style -- and weird European pop," which is intriuging but kinda vague.) Also Wiki lists a ton of Gasolin' LPs, and then more solo ones by Kim Larsen in the '80s (wasn't he marketed as new wave in the States? Or am I just remembering seeing a record ad in New York Rocker or somewhere?) So it's possible their sound changed somewhere along the line too, but I'm not sure how.

...Kim Larsen being their singer and a guitarist (they had two of the latter). Also, Japser/Oliver interestingly call the studio LPs spotty but recommend the live LP, which is the one I have. And they apparently still have enough fans that, from the looks of the links on their Wiki discography page, all their albums get individual Wiki page writeups -- hardly a given for even big American '70s hard rock bands.

(Re: The Call. I liked them a lot in the early years, when they were sort of like a U2 that stuck with New Wave. "Walls Came Down", their first bit hit, is from album 2, Modern Romans, but my favorites are the next two, Scene Beyond Dreams and Reconciled. After that they got mixed up with Robbie Robertson and tried to go gruff and soulful, which lost me. Leader Michael Been's son is the lead guy in Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.)

Back to actual past-expiry hard-rock, I was just looking through my records to see what bands, if any, I've liked pretty much unchanged (I mean, my liking of them has endured, and they have endured) since I started taking notes in about 1985. Rush are close, if only I liked the last couple records more. Black Sabbath can't quite count, with all the singer-changes and now the name-change. So the winner?

UFO.

Hearing way more Faces and Humble Pie on the second Detective album (It Takes One To Know One from '77) than I'd noticed the first, and it's just a more consistent album in general -- and right, they're dressed even more disco on the cover. Hearing "Help Me Up" and the appropriately funky "Betcha Won't Dance" as the most undeniable Faces rips; "Dynamite," more Humble Pie, locks itself into the album's best pocket. "Competition" reminded me of Rose Tattoo in their Faces mode (maybe just wishful thinking?); "Something Beautiful" has some Rod Stewart in its singing but it's just as much a Yes ballad, thanks to Kaye's fancy keys. And they save the two most swinging Zepalikes (as good as Fastway at least), "Fever" and "Tear Jerker," 'til the very end.

....Though actually Popoff claims "Competition" and "Dynamite" are the real Zep rips, and "Betcha Won't Dance" is mere "flippant party rock," so maybe my ears were screwed on wrong when listening. Unless his were.

So what do people think and/or know about Cock Sparrer? I don't think anything; probably used to have a couple cuts on oi! compilations, but I can't say they left a huge impression. But they were around since 1972, supposedly, which seems interesting. Also, they were apparently known to spar with cocks. Anyway, Home Blitz (which is basically Daniel DiMaggio of Princeton, NJ, who used to intern for me at the Voice and who wrote a couple reviews back then and who used to post occasionally on ILM) cover Cock Sparrer's "Is Anybody There?" (the original of which I don't think I've heard, but which seems to be about not getting to play on Top of the Pops), and give it powerpop jangle guitars out of the Searchers' "Needles And Pins" thus turning it into a zero-fidelity version of of maybe a Dwight Twilley or Bram Tchaicovsky song but with march beats in the middle on their new Out Of Phase album, and I like it. Also kinda like the other Jonathan Richman-whiney exurban no-fi nerd pop with intermittent late Flaming Groovies guitar parts Dan does, for instance one about driving scenically on Route 18 (toward Rutgers in New Brunswick maybe?), and I don't even mind that Home Blitz stick a couple quiet little noise-artfuckery interludes between tracks where it sounds like they're wheeling carts around the studio and breaking glass. No songs about baseball this time, but the label is Richie Records, the logo of which seems to be inspired by Richie Allen. Predict George and Phil would hate it, but there's a good chance Scott might like it a lot. No idea what Frank would think, but I'd be curious.

The Myspace lists Game Theory (?) and Big Star among their influences:

http://www.myspace.com/homeblitz

Something I wrote about them a couple years ago:

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2008/07/hometown-heroes-do-the-ballroom-blitz.html

Also been liking the new album by Eddy Current Supression Ring from Melbourne, who also have tasty guitar jangle parts though probably not enough of a rhythm section, and also sound like regular guys singing about regular stuff regular people do. Album is Rush To Relax, on Goner. Not buying the Marquee Moon comparisons other people have supposedly made, but maybe I will someday. Previous album reminded me of Feedtime and Screaming Blue Messiahs; this one sounds spacier. My hunch is that that makes it not quite as good, but I could be wrong.

Their myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/eddycurrentsuppressionring

What I wrote about their last one:

http://www.spin.com/reviews/eddy-current-suppression-ring-primary-colours-goner

Also, Legendary Shack Shakers probably belong on this thread (well, for referencing past expiry hard rock at least) as on the country one. Here are some notes I wrote about their new one there. (For more on the new Shooter Jennings album, which is definitely way more loud rock than country, just not really all that good at it, back up a few posts):

Rolling Country 2010

Legendary Shack Shake myspace (might take a while to load, but the blog entries part has an extensive rundown of old "guitar-oriented stuff" they say they've been listening to, like Willie Dixon for instance):

http://www.myspace.com/legendaryshackshakers

For instance, implying that a sinister ruling cabal wants to turn America into a police state: that’s provocative, if unoriginal in rock. (Police states were the major concern of hard-core punk in the 1980s.) Borrowing, as Mr. Jennings does in “Summer of Rage,” a segment of a taped speech by Myron Fagan, the cold-war conspiracy theorist who believed that the Illuminati controlled the media and that desegregation was a communist plot: that’s unwise, at best. Using the speech as background in a rock threnody for the end of civilization with drum machine, rampant echo and weeping trumpet: that’s hilarious.

“Summer of Rage” is followed shortly by “The Illuminated,” with Walpurgisnacht Floyd riffs, clip-clop percussion and Autotune bombast, ending in air-raid siren. Illuminati ... Illuminated ... are we on to something? Dunno. The whole record is vaguely about coming to realize that you can’t trust anyone but your mother

Got this from your link on RC 2010.

So Shooter Jennings is a Tea Partier and one of the more fringy ones, at that. I'd get the record to see if it has the usual Bilderberg/Skull & Bones/Council on Foreign Relations stuff -- which always seems to accompany the Illuminati, too -- but "rampagingly awful" is too big a putdown to sacrifice a few bucks on.

You know these guys would be doing rock opera's based on the The Turner Diaries if they thought they could get away with it. And it just hadn't inconveniently been written by a neo-Nazi and the hang and shoot all the people of color part had just been buried a little more with regards to blowing up government buildings, killing the tyrants and taking the atheists off to concentration camps.

Ah, don't have to get the album. The big magilla -- the overlords, the CFR, big Alex Jones fan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvHEmTiFEts&feature=related

The Runaways movie soundtrack album. Glam record of semi-stuff, some of it bad

1. Nick Gilder - "Roxy Roller"
2. Suzi Quatro - "The Wild One"
3. MC5 - "It's A Man's Man's Man's World"
4. David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel"
5. Dakota Fanning - "Cherry Bomb"
6. The Runaways - "Hollywood"
7. Dakota Fanning - "California Paradise"
8. The Runaways - "You Drive Me Wild"
9. Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart - "Queens Of Noise"
10. Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning - "Dead End Justice"
11. The Stooges - "I Wanna Be Your Dog"
12. The Runaways - "I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are (Live)"
13. Sex Pistols - "Pretty Vacant"
14. Joan Jett - "Don't Abuse Me"

MC5's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" is James Brown, I think, and you know why they picked it. But this is one no one's gonna want to listen to more than once.

One usually picks a really cool number to start off. So it's a mystery why Nick Gilder is here. Well, no, it's probably not. It's probably used for an early seen hanging out at the Roxy.

I'll be interested in hearing the updated version of "Dead End Justice" since it's basically half
a really poorly acted skit. Which I originally thought lent unintended charm to the number.

"He beat me with a board/It felt just like a sword."

Ogden Nash'd be proud.

I can't help but think Dakota Fanning is in this because of "The Secret Life of Bees."

Hey, for xhuxk, check the 'songs about prostitution' thread for the youtube steal of Armand Schaubroek's "Ratfucker." Did the Tubes' Young and Rich just drip that or vice versa or not? Rhetorical question, obviously.

I can definitely hear a connection. That and the Kevin Coyne song that George sent me a youtube link to today, "Good Boy," both have lots of crazy musical force to them, vocal and otherwise. Both mainly....rants, I guess. Have never actually heard Shaubroeck (Steals) before, I don't think, though I've been hearing about him forever. How good was he?

Lots of Coyne here, if anybody's interested:

http://kevincoyne.blogspot.com/

Also, I actually do like "Roxy Roller" -- though maybe more so in the Sweeney Todd version, featuring Bryan "Guy" Adams. (Actually like Nick Gilder in general, and appreciate the contribution he made in keeping glam rock alive in Vancouver in the mid to late '70s when it apparently had died most everywhere else, thus paving the way for Streetheart.)

Pulled out Fanny's Fanny Hill from 1972, and it definitely had more organic boogie dirt beneath its nails than that later post-touring-band album I talked about a bunch of posts above. But I'm not sure that makes me like it more, to be honest. Their version of "Hey Bulldog" fucking kills kills kills, and the the first couple songs on Side One ("Ain't That Peculiar" cover and "Knock On My Door") have some okay thump to them, and "Rock Bottom Blues" is a decent midway point between pop boogie and pop glam even if its opening does remind me too much of "Your Mama Don't Dance" by Loggins & Messina (same year.) But lots of the rest just sounds too frigging hippified for my taste -- you can really hear the lesbian-folk boat about to roll ashore in June Millington's ballads. She even has one called "Think About The Children," for God's sake, and she's not joking! Guess the gospel backup and bullfight bolero horns in the closer "The First Time" should be interesting on paper, but I could live without them, too. So I dunno.

Occurred to me that the first Home Blitz album from a couple years back and Cheap Trick's Latest album from last year have something in common in that, in both cases, the best track was a lesser-known Slade cover: "My Town" and "When The Lights Are Out," respectively. (I wound up liking the Home Blitz set more myself, but I get why some wouldn't.)

Got an archival CD by a St. Louis band called Raymilland in the mail today: Recordings '79-'81. Theoretically "post-punk", and definitely sounds like brainy kids playing with their chemistry kits a lot (think I stole that from Frank), but who its melodies and singing keep bringing to mind for me is actually the Bizarros, for some reason.

Alex Jones's Wiki page lists KRS-One and Willie Nelson as also having appeared on his show; I definitely heard Dave Mustaine on there a month or two ago too. My car dial always seem to land on the show on Saturday afternoons, for some reason. Jones is based here; not clear to me whether he's as big a radio presence anywhere else -- but in general, I get the idea Austin counts as some kind of conspiracy-theory capital. The mood here just feels conducive to that kind of thinking, somehow. Lotsa Ron Paul stickers around, still. Theoretically outlaw city that's been home to aging hippies with fried brainpains for decades ("keep Austin weird") in an archetypally right-libertarian cowboy state that wants to indoctrinate Christianity and creationism in school history and science classes, so no big surprise. Neither was Joe Stack, maybe.

Some maniac posted almost an entire 12/23/72 Grand Funk Railroad concert on YouTube. Enjoy! http://bit.ly/g_f_r

got the moses cd reissue on shadoks and i'm really digging it. very cool danish power trio. only made one album. love the arrangements and production. some cream, some sabbath, you know the drill. but definitely worth a spin or five. phil, you would dig it. i think.

http://psychedelic-music.com/GIF/Moses.gif

(one of those albums i'd always heard about but never got around to hearing till now.)

mentioned the "official" reissues of amazing african psych records by witch and amanaz on the reissues thread, but i feel like i should mention them again since i can't stop playing them. the witch album *lazy bones!!* definitely belongs here. hard and heavy zambian psych/hard rock.

http://www.exiledrecords.com/shop/images/witchlazybones.jpg

I got those African albums - Witch and Amanaz - in the mail this weekend, and really didn't like them as much as I'd hoped to. Nigerian rock bands (BLO, Moussa Doumbia and Ofo the Black Company in particular) just stomp all over 'em. More fuzz, wilder rhythms, over-the-top vocals...the Nigerians had everyone beat in the '70s. I think I had that Moses disc at one point, too, but it kinda slid under a pile of other stuff.

i think the amanaz is sublime. and a wonderful psych album. as far as witch goes, let's just say that i'm pretty easy to please as far as 70's hard rock goes and its got some cool moments.

Count me among those who think there is a ruling elite of some sort and that it's worth investigating the visible organs of power (e.g., the CFR), that it's not ridiculous to talk about the risk of the U.S. becoming a police state given the extent to which our rights have been trampled on in recent years (continuing into the current administration), that the revolving door between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve is more than a little troubling, etc., etc. The people I relate to the least are the ones who feel not outrage about anything and seem incapable of imagining how fucked we actually are.

(But no, not a fan of Alex Jones.)

I guess this is just crazy conspiracy theory too.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006/

And I guess it reflect poorly on me that I wonder why the corporate media has almost completely left this story untouched.

She started her own website, incidentally:

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/

But lots of the rest just sounds too frigging hippified for my taste -- you can really hear the lesbian-folk boat about to roll ashore in June Millington's ballads.

You need to dig out Mother's Pride too. You should see all the pics in the Rhino Handmade box. They really did drip that rock hippie house off Sunset vibe where Lowell George would come to teach 'em to play slide and everyone would hang vibe. My only gripe is they could've been encouraged to inject more venom at a time when the guys were certainly doing it.

Don't have any Mother's Pride; decided instead to go full-on early '70s pre-fab in order to clear all that hippie fiber from my guts: The Wild Thing album by Fancy (who I used to get confused with Fanny oddly enough -- and yeah Scott, I've always mixed up Ayers and Coyne too), on Big Tree Records (also home of Brownsville Station for some years there), from 1974. Title-track Troggs cover was a #14 hit; followup single "Touch Me" where the girl in the band tries to sound al sexy, went #14. Don't think I've ever heard either of those songs on the radio. Apparently they were British, and maybe it's possible they actually played live sometimes, but they sound like such a disco-forecasting studio concoction they make the band on the first Ram Jam album seem like, uh, the Grateful Dead. Liner notes: "Wild Thing, an old song, a new version, a chart record. Fancy, a New Band, great guys, fantastic chick. Don't listen to this ecord alone, it takes two to...Tango?" Four good-looking people probably in their twenties on the cover, two trying to look tough in their leather jackets, one who looks more a junior professor type, and a blonde squeezed into cut off jean shorts. All conceivably on cocaine, or hoping to look like they are.

Lots of cowbells and congas all over, but also chunky bubblegum hard rock riffs -- really, given this was England, maybe not far from Chinn and Chapman's early works for the Sweet (or maybe even Chicory Tip or somebody more mysteriously Brit like that), though here the producer and principal songwriter turns out to be some guy named Mike Hurst (who Wiki explains had earlier produced Brit hits for the Move and Manfred Mann, and later managed Shakin' Stevens and discovered Samantha Fox.)

Catchiest non-singles are probably Fancy's clueless bid for mid-American high school parking lots sock-hop nostalgia number "Move On," extremely Diddleyfied "Between The Devil And Me," and percussive closer "Feel Good," none of which one recalls much else about once they end. Okay, just found this on last.fm: "Fancy is a British white funk band of the 1970’s most famous for their cover of the Trogg’s 'Wild Thing,' a single which went gold in the U.S. Former Penthouse pet Helen Court sang steamily, Rick Fenwick ex-of the Spencer Davis Group played guitar, Mo Foster bass, Henry Spinetti drums and Alan Hawkshaw keyboards. Fancy released several subsequent albums replacing Court with Annie Cavanaugh from the cast of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, but failed to regain the same success." So there you go.

Finally, fwiw, I definitely think there is some middle ground between believing that all is for the best in the best of all possible words and thinking Boxcar Willie was a lizard person. But that's just me.

Actually "Touch Me" went #19, oops. (And then in 1986, Samantha Fox had her first hit, also named "Touch Me," which went #4. Coincidence?)

Also meant "Don't listen to this record...," obv. (And didn't mean to imply Chapman/Chinn produced Chicory Tip; that came out wrong. Also don't think Fancy get anywhere near as catchy as the Sweet.)

i love the fancy wild thing cover. i have the 45. i need the album. or i want to hear it at least. i'll find one out there.

(Also, duh -- Mother's Pride is a Fanny album, not a band! Don't think I've ever actually heard that one, but I'll keep an eye out.)

i always want to like fanny records more than i do. i've tried over the years. i think i've heard them all. there is a great comp to be made of their strongest songs. but for the length of an album...usually i get kinda bored. even the glam makeover doesn't do too much for me. i'll take that debut by Isis for rockin' 70's ladies.

Coyne videos linked here so they don't clog, along with excerpt from the thread. See 'blogroll meta' in sidebar for attrib.

http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/2010/03/01/brit-idiosyncracy-always-waives-the-rules/

Uh, well it displays on the main page.

Listening to a disc today that I highly recommend to Scott and George and recommend Chuck totally ignore: Walk the Nile, by Elephant9. They're an instrumental organ-bass-drums trio on Rune Grammofon; this is their second album. Ultra thick prog-rock grooves, like what might have happened if Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Gillan had fallen off the stage during a Deep Purple show in '72 and the other three had to vamp for an hour. The drummer is from Shining, whose latest album Blackjazz combines free skronk, death metal and industrial into a huge howling roar (and closes with a massively ear-destroying version of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man") and the keyboardist is from Supersilent, but don't let that fool you - he's in full Lord/Emerson territory here, and the bassist (who's from a group I've never heard called National Bank) is working a groove somewhere right between Chris Squire of Yes and John Lodge from the Moody Blues. This is a really heavy album that kinda blindsided me with its awesomeness; made to be played loud, for sure.

i was actually gonna recommend that elephant9 album to YOU, phil, a week or two ago. but i forgot to. i love it. been playing it a lot.

recommend Chuck totally ignore

Uh, doesn't sound like something I'd hate, Phil! I might even like it. (Fwiw, a weirdo prog album on Rune Grammofon, Jono El Grande's Neo Dada, made my Pazz & Jop last year. And "massively ear-destroying version of King Crimson's '21st Century Schizoid Man'" sounds like it could be a real cool thing; ditto extended Jon Lord-style organ vamping. So, not like I'm averse to that kind of stuff -- though if you're guessing I might prefer it with a singer, you could be right.)