Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2009

interweb descriptions of the first album say it's not as good or as rockin' as the 2nd album. 2nd album is from 1978. gorge must remember them.

They're rubbish, the ratings, not the Werewolves. I had both, listened to the first one more because it had better songs. The second may have been a bit harder sounding. They were in the same vein as Tears who are in need of a very limited edition remaster.

Look up my Monster Records sampler review. That's where American Dog was dealt with.

This made me laugh. What the Internet is really good at: Making sure the most obscure sidemen get their hagiographic biographical entry on Wikipedia. Erik Cartwright, guitarist for the really shitty Foghat LPs was one of the guys in Tears. And another journeyman band, Bux, who wound up being sidemen for Joe Perry and Kim Simmonds in one of the shorter-lived incarnations of Savoy Brown.

xp Actually Outlaw Records. (Monster was the label that reissued obscure heavy sludge bands of the early '70s, as I recall):

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

oh and i meant to post this info about the suicide commandos video:

"one nightin the fall of '77, the Minnetonka Fire Department burned down the condemned Utopia House--the legendary Commandos HQ that the band had rented for $30 a month. Knowing it would happen, the band wrote one of its finest anthems for the occasion--"Burn It Down"--shooting a video for the song with the flaming house as a live backdrop"

Holy moley! Every time I go out to the Village Voice they've worked even harder at making the website user hostile. I didn't think it was possible, but the webmasters keep upping their game. If they work even harder, maybe Google can be persuaded to put a little "This website may be harmful to your computer" warning on search results from it.

Have to have a really old computer that does not grok the fancies. Links in original aren't enabled, I'd be informed too much BBCode.
Ride Hard, Die Hard
Under-the-Table-Again Rock
George Smith
Tuesday, January 14th 2003
photo: Dee Lippingwell
Randy Rampage is not a dead boy.
Randy Rampage is not a dead boy.
Details:
Raw Trax 02: 100 Proof Ass-Kicking Rock & Roll
Outlaw Entertainment import
Raw wrath and metal roll always win out. No matter how retro or staid, the best hard rock in 2002, by far, came from those who instinctively grasped that respect must be paid to ground broken in the mid '70s, not only by the big guns but also by the toilers and failures. Which brings us right to Raw Trax 02, a compilation whose contributors fall so neatly into the category of biker rock that one envisions them all deeply influenced by AC/DC, Nazareth, Moontan Golden Earring, and the Don Brewer-produced Godz.
Four bands deliver; a fifth is rotten, and will be shunned for the duration of this review. (They're at the tail end of the disc, so no one has to endure them to hear the good stuff.)

But first off is American Dog, of the corny name but distinctly un-corny bluesoid metal. The beats on "TV Disease" and "Shitkicker" are locked in, living on the highway. Blown out of the water as Salty Dog a dozen years ago by the Nirvana revolution, the sound is now stripped anti-Hollywood middle-American. The band knows that their place isn't selling anything but live music for the near to down-and-out, and they do it pretty well. They probably work in tattoo shops that are infrequently closed down by health inspectors.

And even that's not as scary as Billy Butcher, an old-fashioned Billy Gibbons-style songwriter and axman who acts like the last decade never happened. Way beyond the Black Keys, "Stateside Walking Shoes" squanks along like an engine with one scored cylinder backfiring against the other five—in a good way. Even better, when you expect Butcher to get all hackneyed and start singing about leaving trunks or one bourbon, one shot, and one beer, he reaches for the Benzedrine. Johnny Winter And . . . is hidden under the pillow, too, I bet.

Related Content
April 27, 2009
More About ...
Billy Butcher
Eric Moore
Nazareth
Johnny Winter
Billy Gibbons
I thought Randy Rampage was dead and apparently everyone else did, too, because Raw Trax goes to great lengths to assure the listener his contributions aren't posthumous. He used to be in DOA (or the Subhumans, maybe, or Annihilator?), and he's Canadian, I think. So he names a song "Bytor," but it doesn't sound like Rush. I bet he always wanted to do that. Rampage also does AC/DC with a barrelhouse electric pianer tinkling along in the background. Plus a Dead Boys cover, which every decent gin-joint act should be up to.

And, finally, what would an accidental monument to the Godz be without a God?

Raw exhumed Eric Moore, who many believed deceased, too. But he was probably just in jail, judging from his song "Criminal Mind." Moore's Godz remain true-blue meatheads, still playing "Mongolians" from the mid '80s, a song probably left off of 1979's Nothing Is Sacred. The Godz remain the missing link between Black Oak Arkansas and David Lee Roth—a dubious classification except to those who like to imagine hirsute fiends scaring tourists in Hollister between recuperative naps in the back of a squad car. In other words, Godz-metal is the rock and roll you get from a bunch who are a hybrid of the exaggerated plug-uglies Phillo Beddo harassed in Every Which Way but Loose and Billy Jack kicked in the teeth in Born Losers. Indispensable.

(More by George listed after this credit for something)
Outlaw Entertainment International Inc., 101-1001 West Broadway, department 400, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6H 4E4, outlawentertainment.com

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In dubious battle: The military's love affair with technology, from video game to secret weapons

Yikes!

Back in the analog world: New England, self-titled LP, Infinity, 1979: Supermelodic (like, post-Boston at points, also maybe a little post-Queen to go with the inevitable post-Styx etc.) pomp AOR, complete with a superdupermelodic hit single "Don't Ever Wanna Lose Ya," which just barely squeezed into the Top 40. But my two favorite cuts are probably the OTT-tempoed "Shoot" and the maybe even more so "P.U.N.K.," which stands for "Puny Undernourished Kid" and I swear revolves around a subliminal (maybe accidental?) (maybe imaginary? you decide) Sex Pistols riff. But of course it's all Billy Joel-style resentment about the stupid younger-brother generation: "You've got chains for brains/When you eat 714s for supper/Hey kid, you're only 16/And you've got too many lovers/Don't put salt in your wounds/If you're trying to make things better." Good advice! (And 714s were of course 'ludes, at least as much a metal drug as a punk drug where I grew up.)

Also talked a little about a live CD by them a couple years ago:

Rolling Metal Thread 2007, Part II

Hey hope I didn't get to presumptious posting that, Gorge. Great piece, anyway, I'll have to check out that comp (and Zolar X! WE need a glam thread!)

Re the Zolar X reunion, Make sure you don't pay full price. It's entertaining but ... one of those things you won't wind up listening to more than a handful of times. Kind of like the original. It shares the glam as done by the Lee Harvey Oswald Band phenom: You put on Blastronaut, listen to "Surrender Earthlings" five times in a row, exclaim 'This out-Spiders the Spiders from Mars!' and an hour later you put on Ziggy and never come back to them.

Jasper and Oliver label '70s threesome American Tears "plod pomp" in their book, and listening to Tear Gas (Columbia, 1975), I'd have to say they hit the bullseye with that one, even though a couple moments (the title track, and parts of "Serious Blue Boy {Sail On}" before it starts sounding like "Jesus Christ Superstar") pick up at least a little beyond plodding. Not much power -- especially guitar power -- to their power trio, either. Too bad, since I like their gas masks on the cover, and they have pretty intriguing song titles (also "The War Lover," "Franki And The Midget"), and my $1 copy caame a neat sheet of band stickers inside. Not sure off hand if they're better or worse than, say, Bighorn or Aviary (both of whom came later), but either way their prog lacks much to grab ahold of.

Don't recall much about American Tears 'cept didn't listen to it much after first purchase. Later changed named to Touch and, for a brief time, went down a storm in England.

loving this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41DNF9RKM3L._SS500_.jpg

acording to sleazeroxx.com this was teaze's 4th album, but the first to be released in the u.s. jeez, you would think they were from finland or something and not canada. can't believe some suit didn't take a chance before then. anyway, i dig it. lotsa super-catchy rocking and some interesting touches. from 1979.

A bit on Teaze's
first album on my blog a year and plus ago. They were indeed fairly neat.

Feel kinda bad about this one, and George is welcome to chide me about how wrong I am about it, but I gotta say I'm pretty severely bored by Chicken Shack's 100 Pound Chicken, from 1969 (Blue Horizon, another recent used buck purchase.) They look like really funny goofballs on the cover, all dressed up in renaissance faire robes and leotards in the woods 'til they all get bloodily killed by a big chicken fallen from the sky on the back (very Monty Python, now that I think of it), but none of their sense of humor seems to translate into the music -- which just mainly strikes me as your usual arid blues-rock stodge, not memorable and not especially heavy, with maybe some guitar parts that are "good" but not particuarly interesting (at least not to me, as a non-guitarist.) They also do a couple passably reverent funk and soul vamps, but somehow they manage to drain almost all the flair out of those, too -- not a fair comparison, I know, but I played the album back to back with Wilson Pickett's Wicked Pickett from 1966 this morning, and they're not even close to the same ballpark. (Also, their "Midnight Hour" is not his song either, fwiw.) Strangely, I've had a CD reissue collection by them for a couple years (From the Vaults on Sanctuary, 2003), and it always sounded okay in the background; not sure if the material is better there (doubtful) or if the vinyl just forces me to listen closer to the dull details.

Nah, you're not wrong re your likes. Chicken Shack's 100 Pound Chicken isn't very fiery at all. Christine Perfect had left -- their best song and the only one to chart was "I'd Rather Go Blind" with her on lead vocal, and it's very pre-Fleetwood Mac. So they started getting harder, Stan Webb wouldn't to do more heavy music, and Mike Vernon wasn't much into that. And, as a result, that record was transitional. Their last album with Vernon producing was Accept Chicken Shack and that was louder still. "Telling Your Fortune" from it was real influential on me. It's classic thumping blooz rock and the album mixes that style with folky blues and some instrumental things. Chicken Shack left Blue Horison and pared down to a trio for the next record, Imagination Lady, which ups the voltage even further, redoing "Telling Your Fortune" as a crunching freak-out which is more an excuse for Stan Webb to walk out on his 100-ft guitar cord live than an actual song.

The first four albums were recently repackaged in a box set. Their first two featured Christine 40 Blue Fingers Freshly Packed and OK Ken. A lot of people prefer them because of McVie's great voice and piano playing; she and Webb split vocals evenly and the latter just doesn't have a distinctive voice by comparison. I like Chicken Shack but they were definitely lodged somewhere between the second and third tier in the Brit blues boom after the initial success of the "Blind" single wore off. Mike Vernon, however, did a great job with them for four albums, and he was always high on them. So if you really like Mike Vernon-helmed stuff, they still offer much to enjoy.

But, in the long run, they certainly weren't Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac or Savoy Brown.

Ah, I mean Stan Webb wanted to do more heavy music, little of which shows up for 100 Pound Chicken, a lot more of which is on Accept Chicken Shack.

chuck, do you have *The Great Metal Discography* by martin strong? another weird book. same dude wrote the great rock discography. i don't think i've actually used it for anything. has discographies for 800+ groups. so, i guess it's kinda cool to check out the discographies for bands like For Love Not Lisa and Four Horsemen and Freak of Nature. kinda curious about Princess Pang now.

Picked up reissues -- not that recent -- of Chilliwack's Wanna Be a Star and Opus X.
Band straddling Eighties AOR pop rock moving into metal, pulled by guitarist Too Loud MacLeod
and bassist Ab who wound up pulling it in the direction of Headpins, their other band with Darby Mills, until it became obvious they were more into the latter.

Both are good albums, Wanna Be a Star having their only single to chart significantly in the US, "My Girl," which I don't remember well. I presume that's because it got regional play in varios areas, and southeast Pennsy wasn't among them. Opus X turns into Headpins without Darby for it's second half, which crashes out with hard AOR arena rock guitar and ensemble vocals appropriately. Liner notes indicate that this was thought to be for the US market but, truly, there was a glut of this sound in 1982 and the competition was fierce even when you had the material. It actually might have been a little too much for audiences into Journey, Starship, The Babys, etc.

Since it was, according to the biographer, decried in the Canadian press for being too much like Headpins, I dragged out Play It Loud and concluded, yeah, that Headpins did Headpins better than Chilliwack doing Headpins with Bill Henderson instead of Darby. But the difference is in increments and and some minor style choices. Less big harmony vocals, almost none really, in Headpins, but more riff and no singles aimed obviously at airplay. But some of the songs just smoke, like "People" and "You Can't Leave Me." Opus X, on the other hand, has a couple singles, "Watcha Gonna Do" and "Secret Information," before dispensing with the restraint for riffage in the last twenty minutes.

One appreciates the over the top singing and high studio sheen coupled with clubbing, often van Halen stiff-necked guitar on Opus X, there to an even greater extent on Play It Loud. It was a good combination and it must have worked for them in Canada for awhile, although far as I can tell, aside from "My Girl," neither band made much of an impression in the states.

gorge, there is a fierce debate going on in my e-mail box. i ended up on this e-mail list of hard rock/metal dudes, and the debate - such as it is - is about who was the fiercest boogie rock band of all time. martin popoff sez it was status quo. some say savoy brown. some say foghat. others say zz top. i might give it to the quo just for sheer singlemindedness, but i want you to weigh in if you feel like it. basically, who blows all others away when it comes to hi octane boogie.

Point Blank? (Though not for a long term, obv.)

"My Girl" -- maybe because the band were Canadians -- definitely got AOR airplay in occasional suburb-of-Ontario Detroit. As did, I've realized in retrospect, "Fly At Night (In the Morning We Land)," off Chilliwack's 1976 Dreams Dreams Dreams, which seemed brawnier more often than Opus X or Wanna Be A Star to me, last time I listened, though I might think differently if I spun them all back to back. I've got all three LPs on vinyl; also a 45, which I wrote about (along with some musings on the band itself) at this permalink:

Mostly German Old Used 45s That Metal Mike Saunders Mailed To Me

Hey Scott, I don't have The Great Metal Discography, though it sounds familiar, and potentially useful. Definitely kinda liked the one Princess Pang LP I bought for $1 last year -- aren't they L.A. sleaze metal guys fronted by an immigrant Swedish or Finn gal (who could easily pass as a sleaze-metal guy dressed up as a gal on the cover)?

Been listening, obsessively, to Coloured Balls and Buster Brown reissue CDs (Ball Power and Something To Say respectively) that came out on Aztec a few years ago. They're totally great; can definitely see them as blueprints for Oz AC/DC/Rose Tattoo/Angel City bogan boogie bands that came later (which is where some of their personnel wound up obviously.) Angry Anderson (their singer) talks in the liner notes of the Buster Brown one about how their audience mainly came from a rowdy Aussie working-class streetwise kid subculture known as "sharpies," a term I don't think I'd ever heard before. Buster Brown also have Phil Rudd on drums; Coloured Balls' guitarist is Lobby Loyde. But when Jasper and Oliver say under both bands' entries in their book that Buster Brown were originally called Coloured Balls, they're wrong; on these two albums, the lineups don't intersect at all -- and in fact, they were known to play on the same bills. Though it seems at least one Coloured Balls guy wound up in a later version of Buster Brown, and Loyde produced them. (Not clear from the liner notes whether he was an actual member; Jasper and Oliver claim he was.)

Lots of other Aussie bands from the time mentioned in the liner notes also, including Skyhooks a bunch of times. Kind of curious now about the Dingoes, who I've always heard of, but never heard. Any good?

Btw, so far my favorite Coloured Balls track is "Human Being," easy, which just kills. And just noticed that the Coloured Balls booklet (just got these a couple days ago) has a longer essay (which I only skimmed just now) about Sharpies - "bored suburbanites whose main access to almost everything was by train," with a gang revolving around every town near Melbourne that had a station. Overseas acts popular with them were the Faces and Slade (both of whom did major tours, clearly influencing the Aussie bands), Suzi Quatro, Bowie, Lou Reed, and other glam acts from the UK. Sounds like the sharpies actually dressed kind of mod, and (the liner notes say) "in many ways it was more Clockwork Orange droog than archetypal skinhead." Also says they came from "all ethnic backgrounds" (though what that means Down Under I'm not sure - -hard to imagine that many aborigine kids joined up), and ranged from young teens to "well into their 20s."

George on that Coloured Balls reissue, a couple years before me:

Rolling Metal Thread 2007, Part II

Also had no idea until reading the liner notes that Stephen Malkmus (!?) had cover a Coloured Balls song ("That's What Mama Said") on one of his post-Pavement albums in 2001. Kind of scared to check out that remake myself, but curious if anybody knows it.

Drunk & fighting rock audiences, perfect for those bands, although they mostly served it better live than in the studio.

I like Lobby Loyde's Obsecration better than the first Coloured Balls record. The first fifteen minutes bring a lot more with Mandu as a singer, then it kind of start's flopping around like a gaffed fish for a long instrumental which they musta thought was great at the time.

Re boogie bands, Status Quo definitely not the fiercest boogie act. Saw them live on an odd bill at the the Sprectrum in their prime. It was Black Sabbath headlining, then Slade, and Status Quo at the bottom. In the UK, it would have been reversed a bit, Slade and Status Quo at the top of the bill. Anyway, Slade took the cake for aggression and spectacle, and Noddy Holder's voice blew the doors off the place. Ozzy was pretty incommoded with substance and Black Sabbath's show, in support of Sabotage, was pretty languorous. Status Quo put on an entertaining set, but when their mannager, Bob Young, joined them onstage to play harmonica on a couple songs, they looked like Sha Na Na.

Don't get me wrong, I like their records, but live they definitely didn't have the heft to put it to the wall like Slade, or more accurately, the boogie acts which were gangbusters in the heartland, like Foghat. Foghat just killed live and I saw them many times in Harrisburg and Philly. No one ever followed them onstage. Once "Fool for the City" became a climbed into radio, they'd hit the stage with it and the attack was merciless. Lonesome Dave had one of the most distinctive voices in hard rock in the Seventies. Francis Rossi of Status Quo, by comparison, well -- there is no comparison. And Quo never really had a lead guitar player, since it wasn't important in the context of what they were projecting. That said, they were huge beyond huge in England and if you have the Anniversary Waltz DVD, you see just how big. It was their 25 year anniversary and the show on it -- well, no one does anything like it. They play with the velocity of the Ramones and condense their songs into long medleys, with 1:30 devoted to each number's central boogie lick and chorus. And since most of these were big hits in the UK, it's quite remarkable. Couple with the Status Quo tone, which is two Telecasters straight into Marshalls, it's distinctive. Even through that, compared to Foghat and early ZZ Top -- and I'll get to Savoy Brown -- they just aren't in the same league of heavy ferocity.

After Tejas -- or maybe even a bit before -- ZZ Top had ceased being spectacular live. They were, however, a spectacle. They towed around this huge set from Texas for the stage and spent a lot of time jamming in which they'd often lose the beat somewhat. Saw them and the show, while it had its moments, often broke down into long stretches of snooze.

Savoy Brown, since for a good long while was Foghat with Kim Simmonds and Chris Youlden, had a similarly ferocious live boogie show. The live sides on Blue Matter and A Step Further pretty much destroy Quo's Seventies
live album, even though that record is quite good. Again it's the attack, and the singers -- Youlden and Lonesome Dave -- plus Kim Simmonds, who in the Seventies was a very loud and heavy axeman, which turn the trick. Those ingredients puts a lot more drama, dynamic and brute force into the boogie numbers. And Status Quo's style was different from that.

Now if you want some relentless boogie numbers, Quo certainly had them: Caroline, Railroad, Roll Over Lay Down, Don't Waste My Time, Big Fat Mama.

But they don't actually exceed the classics like Slow Ride, Fool for the City, I Just Want to Make Love to You, Drivin' Wheel, Honey Hush, The Boogie (SB), Tell Mama (SB), Let it Rock (SB), Lousiana Blues (Foghat and SB), Poor Girl (Foghat & SB), La Grange, Tush, Down Brownie, Just Got Paid.

And if it's really brutal live boogie you're looking for, there probably isn't a recorded performance that exceeds Savoy Brown in Central Park sometime in the very early Seventies with Dave Walker on vocals. It was put out by Relix and during the last twenty minutes, the band just clubs the audience with boogie rhythm and hot riff. If it weren't just rock 'n' roll, it would have been a proto-metal performance, particulary a version of Hip Shake. It's such a remarkable thing that what's left of Foghat, or Foghat II, now do it live and have recorded it twice in the last year and a half.

And we haven't even begun to talk about Humble Pie, right?

And for you real obscurists, after Foghat and Kim Simmonds parted company, Simmonds replaced them with Chicken Shack minus Stan Webb, and that's the band plus Dave Walker on vocals for the Central Park recording. So, yeah, Chicken Shack could sure be heavy, they just didn't do it until that date after they weren't Chicken Shack anymore.

i was just listening to humble pie.

i think a case could be made for cactus as well. not that i ever saw cactus live, but i've heard the tapes of the original line-up live and they were pretty bad-ass.

Yeah, the first double CD off Rhino Handmade makes a case for that very successfully. At the time, the live side of Ot n Sweaty did, too. "We're gonna do a boogie called SWIM, so get your socks a'rockin', baby..." And that was the second version of Cactus. It was mostly all in the rhythm section.

And Ten Years After always gets left out, sadly. After Alvin Lee did "I'm Going Home" at Woodstock, everyone thought he WAS the Man with the Ph.D. in boogie.

I gotta agree with George on this; based on the beginning of this discussion, I downloaded Quo's Pictures: 40 Years of Hits (the 2CD, not 4CD, version) and listening to it now, I'd rank 'em well behind Savoy Brown, Humble Pie and Foghat - in fact, I'd probably just consign 'em to my "Fuck It, It's An English Thing" list alongside T.Rex, Slade, and Sweet.

totally true about ten years after. it is forgotten that they were the heavy blooze rock kings for a friggin' decade.

but t.rex and slade and sweet were great too, phil! you kids today...

I've tried all three and they do exactly nothing for me. T.Rex literally sounds like a Kidz Bop version of early '70s hard rock - the same idea as more traditional hard rock/boogie bands, but sugared up and dumbed down for five- and six-year-olds. The way Kiss was aimed at ten-year-olds, but even younger-skewing. T.Rex are like the Raffi of rock.

Yeah. Bolan just was to twee for the US market, but then Bolan appealed to women in the UK, too, I think. He was also damaged by a dreadful performance on In Concert which went nationwide. He was apparently stewed and turned in a long performance of Jeepster which just fell apart.

Early Seventies boogie acts which did well in the US turned in performances that were poison for female audiences, not like modern country. I never recall many women up front at Foghat shows. If so, they were long suffering and very patient with their boyfriends, or of the type inclined to attend extremely drunk and ready to doff their tops if asked to "Show us your tits."

Pictures: 40 Years of Hits

If this is what I think it is, a good deal of it is pretty bad, selected from charting material from the string of albums where Francis Rossi wanted to do Jimmy Buffet/Kenny Loggins-type yacht rock.

i can't imagine trying to sell T.Rex to someone at this late date. so i won't try. i'm a huge fan of all of marc's many incarnations, that's all i'll say.

I'm not as hard on Bolan as Phil but, for me, he's pretty DOA after about a third of Tanx. And I had almost no use for that album when it was originally issued. Bona fide pop star, not much as a hard rocker. Most of the readers on this thread would get more use out of famous 'huh's?' like Hustler's Play Loud or High Street.

This video from 2007 shows how to still do Savoy Brown and not be lame. Ugly old man with Flying V mixing thud, crunch and an almost discordant blues change to a thumping beat. The vocals, originally by Chris Youlden, held up the song, too, but the album also put the number to a horn arrangement. Both versions work, actually. The hair-parting crunch coming off the stage, if my experience at these types of 'for boomers blooz shows' in the LV was any barometer probably annoyed the heck out of about half the audience. And sent the women packing.

There's almost no good old Savoy Brown tape on YouTube, which is kind of common state of affairs for a lot of
these types of bands. On the other hand, there's lots of worthless homemade videos in which the fan makes a slideshow of old amp covers and publicity photos set to a cut from the original vinyl. Those are truly worthless and plentiful.

there IS this on youtube though, and it's worth its weight in friggin' gold:

SO AWESOME!!!!

seriously, that just blows my mind every time i see it.

Yeah, I'd been looking at that and you beat me to it. Surprisingly, almost everything else is from 1993 or the Foghat II. Lonesome Dave in his shiny gold/silver suit. That looks like from when they were in support of Rock 'n' Roll Outlaws.

Offsite, today: The Poor Man's Jimi Hendrix

re: The Martin C. Strong Great Discographies are ridiculously useful. Half-Price Books had all of them several years ago. "Alternative & Indie", "Metal", "Psychedelic" and "Rock". Massive books with complete Discographies, memberships and histories of bands you never heard of and the most famous.

A random list of acts in Metal Marshall Law, Mary Beats Jane, Massacre, Masters of Reality, Max Webster, May Blitz, Mayhem, MC5, Duff McKagan, MDC. The writing has some humor and opinion to keep it from getting too dry, but I think I most enjoy reading about all the second and third tier UK musicians and how they moved from group to group throughout the 70s.

Have just been listening to the recent reissue of Shakin' Street's Vampire Rock, allegedly only '999'
copies, off a Euro imprint. The US debut, their second -- which repeats some of the numbers from this -- was produced by Sandy Pearlman of BOC and had much more of polished heavy metal whoosh to it, plus Ross the Boss, who added standard grade excellent Ross the Boss solos. Vampire Rock has a much rawer, violent sound. There's no big cushion of arenaverb on the guitars, so it actually fits the tone of the time better than the Pearlman produced thing.

No "Suzie Wong" -- Shakin' Street's best tune. But substitutes more speed and boogie, "Celebration 2000,"
"Love Song," sounding much more recorded under the influence of sulfates. Plus nothing on the second on CBS quite like "Blues is the Same," where Shine plays a little harmonica. Come to think of it, the original solos by Frenchmen sound very Ross the Boss-ian, either indicating they listened to the Dictators a lot, or they just alike melodically, or they were yanked from their duties for who knows now what reasons.

Like Telephone, Shakin' Street showed the French could do hard rock 'n' roll real good. However, the chirpy and fluty singing style which seemed to go with French acts of the time was met with no curiosity or patience here.

Lotsa crunch and crash on this record, though.

And if you think my posts look dyslexic in spots -- they do -- it's because of ILX's crippled format, or mine, depending upon your point of view. The ILX message box slides off the right side of my browser screen into a blind spot. And I'm sick of constantly having to readjust it with style sheets changes in the 'preferences' tab, changes which don't stick because of buggy software, on my end or its end, who cares.

But back to Vampire Rock -- which still kills thirty-one years later. Version of the Stones' "Yesterday's Papers" which also surpasses most of the imagination shown on the Pearlman-produced domestic release. I knew I liked the first record more for many reasons -- see xhuck's gut feeling upstream re my taste -- and these are some of them.

See here now, xhuxk, Uriah Heep's "Look at Yourself" is a fast shuffle,
not a Latin beat although I see where you'd get that in 'tinge' from the drum break and coda played by the dudes from Osibisa. Who were from Africa.

And, actually, Pete Townshend's flurrying guitar style is, and he's done it on TV, derived from flamenco playing. The fast da-d-da-daa stuff in open and
down strokes which is present on just about all Who recordings -- which apparently was picked up from someone in his family, like dad (?) or early lessons.

in open and down strokes

Make that 'in up and down strokes'.

The current most vital poor man's Jimi, as per above. The CD Baby offering of the Anthony Aquarius Mystery. It's no mystery his lyrics are a hoot, perhaps unintentionally so. "Love Bathed Experience" and the piece de resistance, "She's All Sheep."

"He even plays left-handed. Strung upside down as Jimi did. A great CD fom (sic) start to finish."

Lenny Kravitz, quit now.

Our boys in uniform try to rock. Oy vey.

Born to be mild

Hooo boy.

I once compared Iggy Pop solo albums to episodes of the old Bill Shatner series,
T. J. Hooker. Most of 'em are as unlistenable as episodes of Hooker were unwatchable. Now he has a new rival, the reruns of "Land of the Lost" on the Sci-Fi Channel, set to coincide with the movie remake and a commemorative box set. "Land of the Last" is uniformly dreadful. I dare you to watch more than five minutes of it sober.

So today's Calendar section in the LA Times devotes two of its three frontpage stories to "Land of the Lost" and Iggy Pop's new solo album. Keep in mind, I used to write almost an entire features section at a Tribune property, then Times-Mirror, the Morning Call in Allentown. And while that paper was mediocre and one was confronted with total crap from the entertainment industry on a daily basis, in the early Nineties it wasn't required that you pretend it always be something it wasn't, as is now SOP.

I'll reprint this graf, on Pop and his new album, Preliminaires.

It's hard to imagine a human being writing it with a straight face.

"Rockers who start second careers by singing jazz have become an industry cliche but
Pop, no surprise, doesn't just rework the standard songbook. Using 'The Possibility of an Island,' Michel Houellebecq's 2005 existential sci-fi novel about a dissolute, desolate icon as a springboard, 'Preliminaires' follows the poete maudit traditions of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the sunny show tunes of Gershwin."

Considering Iggy Pop's 'singing voice,' or facsimile of it, I'd say caveat emptor.

I've heard the record. (I've also read the Houellebecq book, but that's unimportant to this discussion.) Based on your post, I can't tell if you've heard the record or not. It's not terrible, and it is somewhat jazz-influenced (though one song is a conventional rock band arrangement). Iggy can pull off the low-voiced crooner thing when he wants to. It's not something I can really envision myself listening to very often, but neither is Avenue B (his "poetry" album) or Zombie Birdhouse.