Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

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?