Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2009

Although Quaye and drummer Roger Pope were in and out of the backing bands of big stars -- Elton John, Hall & Oates, etc..

Just wanted to pop in to tell you guys that I love reading this thread, even though I can't contribute anything to it. In the past week I've picked up that Last Vegas record and Ten Years After's Stonedhenge based on your guys. Still lukewarm on the first (couple really great songs, but feels spotty) but LOVING the latter.

Love this! I was gonna put it out for sale, but i think i need to keep it:

http://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:xMbN-6bu8UVflM:http://www.musicobsession.com/Pictures/s/l/slaughter134678.jpg

i need a good slaughter & the dogs collection. i know there are a couple of 2 disc sets.

I have the live LP, with the interview disc - think you had to be there!

Went Googling for Slaugher's Bite Back and found this instead, at the top of the results:

http://punknotprofit.blogspot.com/2008/02/dogs-77-bite-back.html

The Dogs were French, not at all like Slaughter & the Dogs, and I'm not even sure the thing profiled and ripped is even a real album. But it does collect much of their best
material.

The best of which was Go Where You Want to Go, an EP I found in '78 or '79 and was surely one of my favorites that year. They were heavily influenced by Detroit in the same way Flamin' Groovies ca. Teenage Head, only they played lots faster. Almost everything they did early was never slower than 130 bpm, the top cuts from the EP being "Here Comes My Baby,"
"My Life" (the guitar coda on this is, to use a bit of hyperbole, 'bitchin'), and
"You're Gonna Lose Me." It was put out by a French record shop called Melodies Massacre, I think.

The Dogs made a bunch of records, some of them on Euro-divs of majors, and were
successful in France. I had one of their later records, too, which might have been more common domestically: Too Much Class for the Neighborhood. It was a bit of a power pop thing and I didn't much care for it.

However, "Go Where You Want to Go" and their very first 45 are on the Punk site collection, and they're terrific, very much concise sneering hard rock 'n' roll with a great rhythm section, all song around 2:30 or less.

A fair amount of video of the Dogs is on YouTube, most of it lacklustre in comparison to their recorded high points.

With Shakin' Street and Telephone, you have a trio of French bands, all doing rock 'n' rll mostly taken from US sources, really well.

And included is this

http://sonsofthedolls.blogspot.com/2007/11/little-bob-story.html

which is Little Bob Story's first EP, on Chiswick, which was swept up by the UK punk rock scene in the late-Seventies because of its pub rock sound.

Both bands appeal to fans of the Vibrators' first record.

i'm a fan of the first Vibrators album.

what i like about that Slaughter album is that is has the conciseness and snarl and thump of punk, but also great freespirited hard rock guitar solos. i like the punk + 70's hard rock combo. neither one or the other. lord knows, there are enough albums that fit that bill, but i'm pretty insatiable.

played the Starz debut yesterday for old time's sake. that first side is so great i had to play it again. (though i'm always a little bummed out when fallen angel ends the side.)

i've listened to The Dogs on youtube and seen their albums but for some reason i never picked one up.

listening to and loving the second Piledriver album today. from 1986. what an apt title too. can't get enough of the crunchy two dollar guitar sound on this album. two dollars canadian, even.

wikipedia says that the two original Piledriver albums have sold over 500,000 copies!! i had no idea.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/c6/f2/5348808a8da0170a742d5110.L.jpg

Didn't Buffin from Mott the Hoople produce that Slaughter album? Or was it a different
one?

Heck, one of the guys -- the one in the pink coat -- looked like he could have been in early Mott the Hoople.

no, that was him! Dale Griffin. He produced some Hanoi Rocks record (or maybe more than one) that i had. he certainly knew how to make guitars sound cool.

did he produce the british lions record?

according to wiki, he produced a lot of the john peel sessions from the early 80's to the 90's. i did not know that.

Good long Ted Nugent cover story feature in the current issue of Texas Monthly -- lots of early biographical details I wasn't aware of, and John Spong talks to Ted's brothers about Ted and about their Dad, and Ted opens up to him to a certain mad extent, and Spong manages to put Nuge's gun-nut megalomania in balanced context. Looks like it's only readable online to subscribers, though.

New Cheap Trick album -- available even on 8-track, as Scott mentioned in another thread -- is better than I would have predicted, though maybe only because I haven't been paying as close attention as I should to their other recent output. Favorite track so far "When The Lights Are Out" sounds very Slade; "California Girl" (not to be confused with "California Man" from 31 years ago) is wild old time r&b-style rock'n'roll. Heaviest track seems to be "Everyday You Make Me Crazy," which also seems really short. Frillier Beatlesque pop cuts may or may not kick in later; right now, I'd say the album is uneven, but playable all the way through anyway.

Also been rocking a couple more old dollar LPs -- Be-Bop Deluxe Drastic Plastic from 1978 and City Boy Young Men Gone West from 1977. Sounds like City Boy may have gotten even heavier and more idiosyncratic as they got funnier and more songful, though it's also possible this later (fourth I think) LP by them was a fluke; it's good either way, even if my wife keeps saying "Bordello Night" (about crossing the Mexican border to pay for nookie -- "burn the midnight oil/you're on foreign soil/that somehow makes it alright" -- sarcastic maybe?) sounds like they're saying "Potato Night." Favorite cut so far, and fastest, is probably "Dear Jean (I'm Nervous)." Lots of jazz worked into the sound, too.

Bebop Deluxe LP is definitely a new wave move, but (unlike I think George), I'm not hearing that as a decline for them -- I pulled out Bill Nelson's Red Noise LP from 1979 a few weeks ago, and that sounded really good to me, too. Heaviest track on Drastic Plastic is probably "Love In Flames," loud prog at punk tempo, as is "Posession," which could almost be one of those weird Cleveland pre-punk art-rock bands like the Mirrors or Styrenes (with even a little MX-80 in the chorus.) Lots of weird loopy Taking Tiger Mountain-era Eno treatments to the guitars and vocals throughout, too, but Eno never rocked like these guys. Also sounds like they were listening to funk, and (in "Japan") maybe Yellow Magic Orchestra. And "Dangerous Stranger" starts with the same riff the Clash would use a year later in the cover of "I Fought The Law," then turns into bubble-prog with deep Coasters-style vocal asides. So, not very metal anymore, but still a load of fun.

PS to Scott -- I got the LPs you mailed; thanks! They look cool. So far I played East Street's Under The Glass from 1977 on Capricorn. Melodic naifs trying to be jazz-rock but not knowing how, with wah-wah parts? Pretty wacky. Pretty sure I like it; definitely dig the LP cover picture where they are all shrunken and trapped in a glass of milk.

Oops, they're called Easy Street, not East Street. (Though in their book Jasper and Oliver call their 1976 debut East Street too! Not sure if that's a typo or not. Say they're "commercial pop/hard rock with a touch of pomp.")

And uh, actually, Yellow Magic Orchestra didn't put out their debut album 'til 1979, it turns out. Which means Bebop Deluxe's Asian-souning techno-pop-rock predated them (though I'm not doubting that Ryuchi Sakamoto came up with the idea on his own anyway.)

I've picked up that Last Vegas record ...couple really great songs, but feels spotty

Yeah, I have to admit this album paled a little bit on subsequent listens; still good, but probably not destined to be one of my '09 favorites in the long run. And now that I think of it, Silvertide's Show and Tell from 2004 might ultimately be a better '00s hair/sleaze/glam CD. (Though I'd still take them both over any that Buckcherry's made.)

And oh yeah, here's a 15-song playlist of $0.69 hard rock downloads Rhapsody asked me to make for them. (More than I'd tend to spend on music myself, but what the hey.)

http://www.rhapsody.com/playlistcentral/playlistdetail?playlistId=ply.28785284

Most popular below-the-bleachers wines at my high school (suburban Detroit, mid/late '70s) were almost definitely Boone's Farm and Annie Green Springs. Never developed a taste for those myself. I'm guessing Stroh's was the favored beer, though maybe I'm just romanticizing its Detrotiness, who knows.

Also been rocking a couple more old dollar LPs -- Be-Bop Deluxe Drastic Plastic

I don't understand what you like about this. It's their worst record, the only one in the catalog I actively hate. Red Noise I did like. It actually stiffened up the guitar again and became abrasive and raw. It was the last record with rock in it that Nelson made for a long time, decades. I'm not sure he actually made any more rock recordings but he is on the Mick Ronson Memorial Concert CD box, a live set, doing the hard guitar hero stuff for a few tunes.

Don't think Annie Green Springs exists anymore.

Boone's Farm certainly does. It's in multi-colors at the no-name bumwine market on Villa. However, it's a bit low in alcohol content, forcing one to buy a couple bottles to get any bang.

Cisco, on the other hand, is the modern equivalent of Lehigh University frat party grain alcohol and fruit juice punch. The frat men would mix this up at about 20 percent alcohol and the co-eds would think it was mildly boosted fruit juice. They'd overserve themselves and wind up blind and rubbery by midnight, blacked out over what went on the next day. It was a date rape drink.

The FTC compelled the makers of Cisco to stop marketing it as a wine-cooler for just these reasons. It's marketing slogan, however, was total truth in advertising and, actually, admirably clever and challenging: "It will surprise you."

The diff between Cisco and frat party grain punch is that the former has a bit more thickness to it, probably due to the addition of brandy as the alcohol booster, rather than
straight reagent grade EtOh, the chem dept's old designation for grain.

After trying it on for size, I can vouch Cisco has a much better taste and finish than Night Train, and it is far superior to Thunderbird which, in retrospect, is true organ-shaking stuff. Since it is that way, it's a bit too easy to drink to a quick destruction. The market sells it in 375 ml bottles, two of which cost a little five and some change, and that's more than enough.

Was War's 'Cisco Kid' named after this, or the other way around, or no connection?!

I checked with my UK colleagues and the hit-the-skids choice is Buck Fast Tonic Wine, made by Devonshire monks or something. Authorities have frequently tried to ban it, since it is the beverage of choice for "neds" (Non-Educated Delinquents) in Scotland, who then get in fights. It has a long tradition as a fighting drink, but so does beer. So what is an 'educated delinquent, an 'ed'? Unlike bumwines in the US, Buck Fast Tonic Wine and its makers have quite a lobbying group and booster organization, so ordnances to ban sales in various locales don't get very far.

Anyway, I think that's what I was told.

This is a horribly cynical but accurate description of the grain punch/Ariba/Cisco raison d'etre, from the urban dictionary:

=========
(They) had a reputation as a "sneaky Pete" because you could slip them to a date who could normally guzzle the 11% beverages all night while keeping her mouth running and her knees together. With a six pack of (Ariba or, now Cisco, which were/are 36 proof, as opposed to the much less 22 p of the 11 percenters) you could get her home from the drive-in movies by one and just dump her and her clothes out on her front lawn and go home and get a good night's sleep.

do people still drink mad dog 40/40?

or god help you this stuff with the fruit at the bottom:

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/eatmycharlotte/files/2009/06/whiskey-rock-n-rye.jpg

i had a lost weekend on this stuff once. ouch what a headache. i think they actually bannned it cuzza the whole indian thing.

http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/native/alcohol/Crazy_Horse_Malt_Liquor.jpg

http://www.40ozmaltliquor.com/images/cases/crazyhorsecase.jpg

there ya go.

Powermaster was the other scary malt liquor. they tried to ban that too. colt 45 made it. i drank so much of that one night that i blacked out and the next thing i knew it was noon and i was lying naked on the kitchen floor.

i'll still rep for mickey's and haffenreffer private stock though. they are decent malt beverages.

the local brew pub here - the people's pint - now makes a craft-brewed 40 oz malt liquor! it's a big hit.

http://beeradvocate.com/im/beers/43401.jpg

"i had a lost weekend on this stuff once."

Man, i lived in NYC for two years (93-94) and barely remember any of it due to Crazy Horse.

do people still drink mad dog 40/40?

http://bumwine.com/md2020.html

Yes.

Damning photography.

http://das-prompt.livejournal.com/356444.html

http://www.speakeasy.org/%7Ecraige/wine/kellycisco.jpg

This girl is ready to rock!

Speaking of past expiry hard rock, I discovered Fear's 78 Paradise Demos, a bit of a misnomer since they were recorded and produced pretty seriously. The rip's on Punk Not Profit, and I'm slightly surprised by what they've managed to get away with, probably because of the egalitarian nature of the 'enterprise' and the obscure provenance of what it posts.

Anyway, all told, it's a really good album and if you hadn't heard "The Record" first, you might wonder why this just didn't get taken to vinyl. It's more of a hard rock production and the rip's levels are poor because the recordings don't look to be mastered. So I corrected that and it sounds like really great mid-70's hard rock was supposed to sound before people made bad style decisions due to commerical pressures. Plus the subject matter is appropriately taboo -- a lot of stuff on beating women, being put to the gas chamber, and the famous 'let's have a war'...

Much more about it later. It was written during Reagan and hasn't aged a bit in terms of cynicism and brutality. Great record, wish you could hear my copy. Fear were never going to be huge, being the first at this, and it would still scare the moms and dads of mall punk
fans. But Lee Ving and Co. should have been able to do more. For the time of this production, 1978, it's something no one else, except maybe the Angry Samoans, were willing to do.

In the US, that is.

City Boy Young Men Gone West from 1977. Sounds like City Boy may have gotten even heavier and more idiosyncratic

Uh, not sure what I was thinking of here -- There are definitely not as many bordering-on-loud/heavy songs as on Book Early, which actually came out a year later, so both my math and my ears were wrong, apparently. Still wonder if whoever wrote in the RS Record Guide that Young Men Gone West (their third record apparently) is where they moved toward "a unique style" might be on to something, though I'd have to hear those first couple albums to make sure. Good, eccentric record, either way -- maybe conceptual, since it starts and ends with songs about Mexico, but also maybe not. (Also, "Dear Jean I'm Nervous" only starts out fast and hard; turns sundry more ornate corners after that. Would have preferred if it stayed fast myself.)

As for Be Bop Deluxe's Drastic Plastic, it's definitely not a great guitar album, so I get why George gags at it. Guess I just have a higher tolerance than him for rock guys copping to geeky new wave hooks (Flush the Fashion still being my favorite post-1974 Alice Cooper album and all.)

Speaking of which, I'm definitely liking Chris Spedding's '77 RAK UK Hurt (also $1) way more than that early '70s Sharks LP I mentioned upthread. Had only ever heard "Get Outa My Pagoda" before. Like his versions of Bo Diddley's "Roadrunner" and Garland Jeffreys' "Wild In The Streets," the latter of which everybody and their mother seems to have covered in the late '70s/early '80s, and it's such a great song I like it just about whoever does. Just wish the Spedding LP had "Pogo Dancing," the single he did with the Vibrators, apparently in late '76.

Though "Get Outa My Pagoda" (a hit in Europe somewhere, I think) is still easily the best thing on the album. And Spedding seems to put his heart and guitar a lot more in his fairly generic quasi-punk hard rock originals (esp "Silver Bullet," "Lone Rider," "Stay Dumb") than into the Garland Jeffreys cover. (Wonder if it's just one of those songs that biz types had everyone cover because they just knew it would eventually be a hit if the right person got ahold of it -- even though, as far as I know, it never was. And no version I've heard improved on Jeffreys' original, either. Though I just noticed that Mott spinoffs British Lions went to #87 in the U.S. with their version in 1978; don't think I've ever heard that one, oddly enough. Jeffreys had apparently peaked at #115 in 1974 with his.) Also should caveat that Spedding attempts a sort of half-hearted Tex-Mex tune called "Woman Trouble." (Also, City Boy do a sort of half-hearted reggae number on their '77 LP, if you're bugged by that sorta thing.)

Hurt[i] was my first intro to Spedding after the Sharks debut.

The change is radical. Sharks were an attempt to duplicate Free. Post Sharks was Spedding latching into new wave and punk rock.

And [I]Hurt is a part of the Spedding as a 50's greaser rock 'n' roller leather jacket thing. Has tunes, most notably the title cut, with Chrissie Hynde singing back-up ala Detroit before she was the Pretender.

"Hurt" was great. So was "Wild Wild Women." "Get Outta My Pagoda" was definitely a top shot, not to my mind better than "Hurt!" "Lone Rider" and "Stay Dumb" were OK, in the same veinas the best from the next alb, Guitar Grafitti, which featured "Miss Betty."

"Hey, Miss Betty/Miss Betty, hey!" -- to a rockabilly greaser pseudo-metal punk boogie
thang. Very Vibrators, his apex, which is the same reason one likes Hurt.

Hurt is set off a monkey beat, something fast and early ZZ Top who also checked into the same rhythm. Difference being: Spedding with a much more 'Memphis' tone and a declining
dissonant lead line in the middle eight (xhuxh tell em, it lasts about five seconds).

But xhuxk left out comment on the reliance on Bo Diddley rhythm, integral to Spedding during this period. Prior to this he was a studio hack great at imitating other famous people like Fripp, Page, etc...

I mean, this doesn't mean anything to you guys, but '78 and these albums meant a lot to me.

I'd just shown up in conformist grad school and I had gone out to stores which had small racks of punk rock imports, very rare in southeast PA, and one had things like the
Dog's Go Where You Wanna Go[i] and Spedding's [i] Hurt[i] and an EP out of NYC by the Idols (which was half the Dolls prior to the Heartbreakers), and these and other things made you just want drop the classic rock thing and get the biker jacket and leather pants, and cut your hair.

And play "Pipeline" real loud, ala heavy metal. The tunes on [i]Hurt[i] with Hyndes and others doing the big heavy soul background vox, even though they don't make up most of the album, really make for a big record.

There were a number of records in this vein, all independent, vanity or satellites on
US majors, another notable being the debut of [/b]Teenage Head[/b], which was a combination of
130+ bpm boogie and rockabilly dressed up into punk. That was a Canadian release. Johnny Thunders' best solo album, [I]So Alone, also comes to mind.

Spedding and Thunders were into doing pop tunes people could sing and dance to, no matter how greaser and outlaw they looked or were. In fact, I always thought Spedding ripped off Thunders' gig because Thunders was too busy being a junky.

Eight years later, the big thing would be Nightranger doing "(You Can Still) Rock in
America" with two shredding guitars and Jack Blades on vocals, which is not so far off -- outside of production values and major label glitz.

And in the early Nineties you'd get Damn Yankees, a band I generally detested, with
"Coming of Age," which -- live -- when Ted Nugent was still clean shaven and
interested -- just killed onstage. As I saw it, pure Detroit rock action, Tommy Shaw
included. You had an ignored revolution of big rock tunes played by people who didn't get resources, to the same kinds of big rock 'n' roll tunes pumped up played by superstars.

God damn! On my side this interface slides off to the side, squirms out from under my cursor, and randomly fucks up hand-coded HTML -- which I'm very good at. Jeezus christ! If
you look at my own blogs, using two different pro interfaces, they're neat and clean. And this bulletin board just makes me look like a ninny.

So on third (and probably last for this week) listen to that Spedding LP, I concede that George is definitely right about "Wild Wild Women" and "Hurt By Love" being standouts. Diddley thump across the board is frequently too subtle for me to pick up on though, I have to admit. Guitar riff all the way through "Wild In The Street" is one Blondie used a year later in "One Way Or Another"; I was already thinking that when Lalena pointed it out to me -- not sure whether that means Blondie were Spedding fans, or they share some undetermined source, or what. Also, "Woman Trouble" isn't half as half-hearted as I suggested above, and might not be half as Tex-Mex, being something of a Chuck Berry "Sweet Little Sixteen" rip that builds as it goes on.

i always liked motor bikin' a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B0GCpQUuDY

Actually, I probably should have added Spedding's greaser catalog contains quite a bit of electric rockabilly use, too. Last CD I saw in the store having to do with him was a team-up with Robert Gordon.

Had hopes for Ellen Foley's Nightout from '79 as a sort of prototype first-couple-Benatar-LPs thing, especially with Mick Ronson producing and guitaring (plus theortetically decent studio rhythm section Martin Briley/Hilly Michaels), so I paid $1 for a used Austin Public Library copy. And strangely enough, it actually opens with a song called "We Belong To The Night" that's not the one Benatar hit with five years later. But starting with that song, the LP turns out to be proto-Benatar in a totally wrong way -- almost all wide-screen pseudo-Spector showtune crap way less audacious than "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" (which is obviously singular even though I kind of hate it in a way). Even the closing Ian Hunter ballad "Don't Let Go" borders on unbearable. Best cut is probably "Hideaway" by one Fred Goodman, also in '79 the only non-Grushecky credit (and I believe the single/AOR airplay track) on the Iron City Houserockers' debut album; Foley's version of the Stones' archetypally sexist "Stupid Girl" (which sort of makes sense sung by a girl) also rocks well enough. And her take on Graham Parker's "Thunder And Rain" is maybe passable, but no patch on the original. That's about it, though.

I just noticed a couple ripped copies on the usual blog sites, so she had some overly charitable fans.
Cover art always looked good, that's about it, one supposes.

Back to the 1978 record, Paradise Demos, by Fear. It has a song called "Fetch Me One More Beer," written by guitarist Philo Cramer. Lo', it's the same as "Johnny, Are You Queer," by Josie Cotton. And the story goes, Josie Cotton's directors used "Fetch Me One More Beer" but wanted to change the lyrics and offer Cramer a writing credit. But, for some reason, he let them use the song but didn't have his name put on it. The reasoning seeming to be that if Fear's soCal punk fans got wind of the fact someone in the band had
written "Johnny, Are You Queer," it would have been thought not punk, and meant bad things for Fear. He should have taken the credit.

Anyway, the chorus in "Fetch Me One More Beer" is virtually identical to the Cotton version: "Fetch me one more beer, boy/You're a fuckin' queer, boy"

Side benefit of Michael Jackson death 24/7 coverage on all entertainment networks: Spinal Tap
'reunion' record, interviews with the bloats, and notice of appearances blown away in the wind.

The quality of mercy dispensed by Ted Nugent has always been pretty strained. Citizens who want revamped health care are 'bloodsuckers.' They need to stop eating junk food, stop smoking crack, stop drinking and get off the couch. If you do that, then you don't need healthcare. It's all about the healthy Ted lifestyle.

I think Ted should be one of the next GOP presidential hopefuls.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32399&s=rcmc

movie about ac/dc fandom. have you dudes seen this? trailer is so friggin' long you probably won't need to see the actual movie:

http://www.currentmotion.com/beyond_the_thunder/
'

For a band that's the definition of the anti-pompous, the seemingly endless trailer really brings the pompous in its capacity to examine the American dipshit's love of turning everything that others do better into
annoyingly fucked-up novelty, useful in commercials or commercials strung together into 'movies'. (Hayseed Dixie, John Rich, Jack Black, Pat Boone, Nike/Gap commercials, dozens of talking heads with stubble emitting inane variations on 'everyone wants to be a rock star in AC/DC,' pro baseball players, military men revving themselves up to some AC/DC song...)

The only thing that seemed missing was Lenny Dykstra spitting out a wad of chaw to AC/DC.

Or we used AC/DC played real loud 24/7 to torture the ragheads at Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Haw haw.

NWOLANWOBHM (= New Wave of Los Angeles New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) video of the year, I assume (and their EP isn't bad, either):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-zehtCs7U