Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2009

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

"I can't stand my neighbors/Screaming all the time/If I wasn't blasting Sister Ray/I would lose my mind!"

Okay, "New York,New York" on the Manitoba's Wild Kingdom album is the coolest thing I've heard in weeks.

http://brooklynrocks.blogspot.com/2009/06/white-wizzard-high-speed-gto-cd-ep.html

The new version of the band is amusing, too. "There's always some church-burning Norwegian warlock in the forest who's badder than you."

"Does White Wizzard attract the lady folks?"

Ans: "So far it's been a couple of tranny hookers."

Actually, the stoner Pasadena old town bartenders partying at the apartment complex pool yesterday were playing stuff that sounded a bit like this.

Saw Wild Kingdom a bunch of times, before and after the release of the 'album,' which is only around twenty minutes long.
Usually they were great. Once, in Jim Thorpe, opening for the LA Guns, they were tired, awful and beaten down by the indifference of the Lehigh Valley crowd. Interviewed them for Creem Metal before it went out of business. They tried for years to get a major label contract, during the height of hair metal, which should have worked. Finally scored, near the end, not that it made much difference. Still have it on CD and whip it out for a play every now and then. As Adny Shernoff's take on thrash metal, it's cool. Brings the tunes. What else was contemporaneous with it in NYC.

Blitzspeer, I think. I have a Blitzspeer EP, a live thing on Epic which was decent.

if you guys don't already have it, both you and chuck need the 1987 Uncle Sam album, Heaven or Hollywood. I can't get enough of it. Punky, snotty, trashy, cruddy production. and it rules! alice cooper-esque at times. i don't know how hard it is to find. i got it in one of those big batches of budget tapes i bought. On Skeller Records!

from over the email transom:

WHITE WIZZARD BASSIST EXPLAINS LINEUP CHANGES, WARNS OF WHITE WIZZARD
IMITATORS

The lineup featured on WHITE WIZZARD's September 8th debut
mini-album, HIGH SPEED GTO is much different from that of the current
lineup whom will be recording a full length album set for release in
2010. Recently, several ex-members from the previous lineup have begun
making headlines in a newly signed band who's former name shared an
eerily similar theme with that of WHITE WIZZARD's. WHITE WIZZARD
bassist, Jon Leon has written a statement to clear up any confusion
about the band's lineup changes and to serve notice that there is only
one WHITE WIZZARD.

"WHITE WIZZARD has had a line up change since the recording of the WW
mini album in 2007. I wrote some songs and formed the first
incarnation of the band rather quickly and went into the studio. The
mini album was a quickly thrown together ep of the first songs just to
get WW started. It turned out well for how quickly it was done, and
the seeds were sewn for the next phase.

Upon completion, the band played a few shows with the first line up.
It was quickly obvious that the line up that was formed to do the
first recordings was not going to work for the long term. The current
line up of WHITE WIZZARD is preparing to record the full length album
that will be out worldwide in early 2010.

Some of the ex members that were in WW for a brief time have a new
band. This band is in no way associated with WW. WHITE WIZZARD has
never split up. WHITE WIZZARD is stronger than ever and fully armed
and operational. As for any ex members we wish them well, but we also
want to stress that in the end, they were not right for WHITE WIZZARD
and are trying to use their WW roots for extra publicity.

We just want to set the record straight. Please look for our full
length album in early 2010 on EARACHE RECORDS worldwide. Also please
enjoy the Mini album, which is a fun sample of early WW songs and only
a taste of what is yet to come. Thanks to all of our early fans for
the support. Please spread the word!! Hails! - Jon Leon"

Named after their trademark anthem, HIGH SPEED GTO features 7
high-energy tracks recorded by the original WHITE WIZZARD line-up in
2007. Originally only released to a select number of fans as a demo,
the title track "High Speed GTO" was then featured on Earache's HEAVY
METAL KILLERS compilation, and now the whole album is ready to be
enjoyed by the world with its catchy riffs and true heavy metal vibe.

The full track listing for HIGH SPEED GTO is as follows:

01. High Speed GTO

02. Celestina

03. Into the Night

04. March of the Skeletons

05. Megalodon

06. Octane Gypsy

07. Red Desert Skies

HIGH SPEED GTO is available now in Europe on and will be released in
North America on September 8th, including the fan-favourite music
video for the album's title track, "High Speed GTO", as a bonus.

Myspace page of the original White Wizzard's singer's new band (who I haven't listened to yet):

http://www.myspace.com/holygrailofficial

White Wizzard story is all too familiar. Lots and lots of guys go through it.

I recorded the first Dick Destiny album sans a real band because no one wanted to do the tunes. After it got some notice, shlubs who I told to play the 'parts' were easy to find. After a year of touring indie dives, their resilience cracked. By the time of the second album, I had an entirely new band except for the drummer. And I had to play everything for the studio stuff again.

Fairly SOP.

Still trying to make sense of the '70s British sort-of-glam band Smokey. Their tracks kept showing up on the compilations I talked about in the thread linked below -- and as I say there, who those songs mostly reminded me of, bizarrely enough, was Dr. Hook more than any glam band*. But last month I picked up their self-titled 1975 MCA LP from a garage sale in my neighborhood, and turns out they could actually do hard rock -- though not especially glammy hard rock. Opening cut "Pass It Around" has as much Free as Slade in it, Side Two opener "We're Flying High" isn't far from the post-Uriah that metal bands like Head East were churning out in the American Midwest, "Don't Turn Out The Light" suggests Yes trying to do reggae of all things, and closer "Going Tomorrow" sounds a lot like Nazareth's version of Joni Mitchell's "This Flight Tonight" from the year before (all the way down to scratchy post-Janis male vocal.) But the singles I recognize from those comps ("Don't Play Your Rock'N'Roll To Me", "If You Think You Know How To Love Me") are more mellow, and somebody has written the following in black ink on the back cover: "Smokey sounds like America, displaying excllent lyrics, vocals, and production." Except they don't sound like America, not to me anyway -- no fake-Neil-Young in them at all. Well, maybe "Umbrella Day" could be America crossed with the Hollies (who also liked umbrellas), but that's it. And then there's "Give It To Me" which opens with martial arts interjections straight of Carl Douglas's 1974 chart-topper "Kung Fu Fighting." So I have no idea whether Americans who heard them considered Smokey (later spelled Smokie apparently -- that's confusing too) a hard rock band. (Their only U.S. Top 40 hit, "Living Next Door To Alice," which I always used to confuse with Dr. Hook's "Sylvia's Mother," came out a year later.) And if it was America fans falling for them in America, what would they have thought if they realized that Smokie were actually, theoretically, Limey glam-rock phonies with most songs credited to Chapman-Chinn? (Though they don't look glam here -- they're wearing flannel shirts, jeans, long hair, even one cowboy hat. One guy does have a sort of Bay City Rollerish looking scarf on, though.)

I Have Never Heard Entire Albums By These Bands Who Have Excellent Songs On Late '70s/Early '80s European K-Tel-Style Compilations

* -- Though apparently Dr. Hook occasionally used to dress up as a fake glam-rock band and open shows for themselves and get booed offstage by their own fans, just for kicks. Pretty sure I read that once anyway.

They were kind of iffy. Chart stuff in England. Oddly, Kim Simmonds' Savoy Brown copies some of their stuff for the Rock 'n' Roll Warriors' album in '81, which was an attempt at poppy hard rock. "Lay Back in the Arms of Someone" which was apparently a hit.

Bought Cheap Trick's [i]The Latest yesterday. Good album. Best song is the cover of Slade's "When the Lights Are Out" from the old In Flame movie/album. The original hard rock is mediocre, particularly "Sick Man of Europe." They're now much better at Beatle/John Lennon Sgt.Peppers/Magical Mystery Tour orchestrated pop. I swear they must put one variation of the 'Imagine' riff on each record, sometimes more, but -- for them -- it works, Robin Zander having such a great voice for that kind of thing. I'd rate it as better than Rockford, the last one, but not as good as Special One, which came before that.

As per usual with Cheap Trick, they should stick to the old vinyl LP days time limit. Anything much over 35-40 minutes/per disc is pushing it, asking for the listener to hit the skip or eject button.

Ha, up above I had written that my "favorite track so far 'When The Lights Are Out' sounds very Slade," and it somehow hadn't clicked with me that it's an In Flame cover. (Though I swear it would have clicked if they'd covered "Them Kinda Monkeys Can't Swing" instead.) Do agree it's a good album, though.

Interesting (and I assume coincidentally, but who knows), George reviews the In Flame DVD together with a live Cheap Trick one five years ago:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-12-07/music/flamboyant-and-amusing-legends-of-hard-rock-show-their-homely-faces/1

Ah, and I do believe Cheap Trick was in the audience the same time I was for Slade in the Philly Spectrum in support of In Flame, which flopped mightily in the States. They lasted one more domestic release after that, I think, another good one called Nobody's Fools. But, at the Spectrum, Slade was tremendous, Holder blowing the doors off the place with his leather-lunged voice. Slade left a smokey burnout on the brains of quite a few that night, also eventually showing itself in the late-Eighties major label surge of Philly chancer/hair metal/glam bands.

And here's my review of Rockford a couple years ago. I seemed to have been nicer to it than I might be now.
About half good, though, which is less than The Latest's ERA.

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2006/07/every-cheap-trick-in-book-faced-with.html

So either Scott and/or George probably advised me otherwise at some point (and Martin Popoff, who gave the album a 5, definitely did), but I wasted $1 over the weekend on a copy of Royal Court of China's 1987 self-titled debut LP. Album just never picks up, and has basically no rocking guitars to speak of -- sounds like a cross between Rubin-period Cult and cowpunk (they came from Nashville, and vaguely sound like it), but without the speed or riffs, and with every song a midtempo that you forget as soon as it's over. Somewhere toward the end of Side Two there's a sort of pretty Brit-folk thing, but by then it's too late. Popoff says they improved with their next album in 1979, which he compares to Kings of the Sun, but I'd have to hear that to believe it.

For some reason listening to that one inspired me to pull out my old 93-cent copy of T.S.O.L.'s Engima sleaze-metal sellout Hit And Run from the same year, figuring they were coming from more or less the same place. Which they kinda were (albeit with maybe as much Danzig as Astbury influence in the howling), but T.S.O.L. won the battle on every level -- Fake Angus riffs, coherent songs, variety, etc. Favorite was probably "Sixteen," but a bunch had meaty hooks to them -- "It's Too Late," "The Name Is Love," "Where Did I Go Wrong." Didn't even hate the totally sappy closer about how it's hard to help people who won't help themselves. Thing is, Popoff gives this just a 5, too, and Revenge from the year before a 6. I don't own any other albums by them; have no idea whether their earlier punk-era stuff holds up better, or worse, or what.

i found the cooooooooolest record today. High Street by Hustler. You guys have it? 1974. Uriah Heep keyboards + Bad Company cockrockitude. love it. and i found it in a dumpster, so it's even cooler, cuz it was free. got a perfect promo copy of Artful Dodger's Babes On Broadway too.

http://991.com/NewGallery/Hustler-High-Street-337831.jpg

Ha ha, Popoff kinda raves about those guys in his '70s book (compares them to Humble Pie/Quo/ Krokus/Purple/Geordie plus AC/DC of course). How the hell did you know which dumpster to look in for old hard rock LPs though??

this kid came into the store with records and i bought some and then he told me there was a dumpster around the corner with thousands of records in it! so, i locked up the store and spent an hour and a half in a dumpster. my friend maggie joined me. she got some cool stuff too.

i posted a bunch of stuff that i got today in the dumpster on the vinyl board:

I Love Vinyl! Recent Haul/Score/Purchase Thread (2009)

I usedta have the two Hustler records. High Street was the first. Both were good to great.

Here's 'Get Outa Me 'Ouse' which seemed to leave a bit of a memory in Blighty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1_4eKzFhZk

"No daughter of mine's goin' out with a ninny/Or a scruffy lil' bleeder like you!"

ha ha

how to store, away from cat

FINALLY someone brings a clean copy of pat travers live to the store. i've wanted to hear boom boom out goes the lights for months. it was worth the wait.

So, anybody but me got any love here for COUCHOIS? Five Huntsville, Alabama boys who look like Canadian hockey players on the cover of 1980's Nasty Hardware where they're jovial and partying with uh VERY BIG SHEETS OF ALUMINUM FOIL (???) over their heads (and one guy's got a beer and another's spraying aerosol into his hat) not to mention like total douchebags on the back cover -- especially the three Couchois brothers Pat, Michael, and Chris. Jasper and Oliver claim "there are enough brothers in this band to start a football team" but I'm pretty sure they miscounted. A foosball team, maybe. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've never heard their allegedly ballad-heavy 1979 debut, but the aforementioned 1980 followup has a whole bunch of super catchy and very very chunky AOR pop-rockers somewhere midway between the Babys and Bad Company (esp. "Trudy You're a Bad Girl," "Pretty Young Girls," and "Innocence" all on Side One), and ends with some awesome five-minute Foreigner-going-disco called "Visbility Zero." Also something called "Roll The Dice" that Jasper/Oliver say was covered by Rage (that the ex-Nutz band, right?) My copy still has an $0.69 sticker from Platic Fantastic. Here's more:

http://www.glorydazemusic.com/articles.php?article_id=2061

I remember seeing the debut in cut-out bins a lot. The Glory Daze reviews references make the one you're talking about sound pretty lite: Pablo Cruise, Player, Firefall, Eagles' 'Already Gone' (which is actually not a bad place to be)... Lot of Firefall is, though.

Here's 'Roll the Dice' in YouTube homemade slideshow glory, including novelty grass and hump dice pics, the kind of things on sale at the Eighties mall store which specialized in black lights, their posters, sugar pills advertised as hangover cures and aphrodisiacs, the tabletop fountain that looks like a faucet suspended by a column of water in mid-air (cf the Peter Sellers movie, "The Party"), etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkolX-n9G0E&feature=related

Sounds like the way xhuxk described. An earlier tune, 'Walkin the Fence,' however, is firmly in Firefall land. Guess it was on the first album.

Ted Nugent's weekly dose of healing balm and kindness of spirit.

http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/07/26/07262009wacnugent.html

Old Home Weeks

http://www.freep.com/article/20090713/ENT04/90713042/Derringer--Foghat-booked-for-Riverfront-festival

Really like these guys' album (out today), fwiw. They're from L.A. ("ex-members of sleaze/psyche semi-legends like Streetwalkin' Cheetahs, B-Movie Rats and Jesters of Destiny"), but fans of Aussie bogan bar-fight rock might well want to check them out.

http://www.myspace.com/anguskhanrocks

Oh yeah -- should also note that it starts with a cover of Sensational Alex Harvey's "Midnight Moses."

Meanwhile, these (more extreme doom whatever and not bad at it I suppose) dudes from Tokyo cover Sir Lord Baltimore's "Master Heartache" on their new album, though I can't promise that any originals match it:

http://www.myspace.com/churchofserialkiller

Also, so far, liking the upcoming album by these far rootsier longtime Georgia also-rans. After two listens, I get the idea they're rocking harder than they used to, though my opinion may change. And their best songs have never necessarily been their hardest rockers anyway; truth is, I've always wanted to like them more than I usually wind up doing:

http://www.myspace.com/drivinncryin

That Angus Khan website is one of the worst I've seen, ever. And that's up against some pretty stiff competition. Wretched. Shun. Avoid like plague.

Here they are in a less annoying visual presentation. Members of the band are familiar. The last
time I saw them they were backing Thor at the Knitting Factory about three or four years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGQZCL9gOfk

Frank Kogan asks the question "What male singers over the age of fifty or acts fronted by a male singer over the age of fifty have made great popular music in the last decade?" I nominated six hard rocking acts (Rick Springfield, ZZ Top, Ted Nugent, Rose Tattoo, Deep Purple, Kentucky Headhunters) and mentioned lots of other middle-aged acts (hard rock and otherwise) who I thought had made pretty good if not quite great music in the '00s. Agree with some of Frank's choices, too. But I'm curious who might not have been mentioned yet:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/156151.html

New Heaven and Hell record, if not great, is pretty damn good considering.

Don't have time this morning to go through that link, but what I've heard of those last two Ian Hunter records sounds really good to me; don't know how popular sales wise.

I was thinking of Ian Hunter as well. Also, though not fitting on this thread but relevant to Kogan's question, the last two Robyn Hitchcock & Venus 3 albums are probably the best things he's done in twenty years. Joe Henry is 50 next year and doing his best work; Wino is 48 so nearly eligible.

Lemmy in Motorhead, Phil Mogg of UFO. Not all of their albums have been godd, but some of them
have been so. Mogg has been a consistantly good hard rock singer.

At least one Status Quo record in the past couple of years has been good, which drags in Francis Rossi and Rich Parfitt.

Suzi Quatro was over 50 when she did Back to the Drive which was a good album.

Quatro only excluded because not white male, obviously.

John Waite -- The Hard Way and the Rounder thing, which included older stuff, too.

That last Uriah Heep record was really strong, too.

Yeah, Kogan mentioned Waite himself, and I seconded it, on that thread. And I said I'd heard good things about that Heep album; still need to check it out. Really need to hear that Quatro now too, which I didn't even know existed. But personally thought the last couple Ian Hunters sounded competent at best (prefer his new one to his previous one, though.)

As per recent announcement of purchase on "I'd buy that for a dollar!" Nothin' on the Boyzz album reaches the mania of these local TV clips from a show at the Agora in Cleveland. If they record company had been able to capture --this-- on vinyl, they might have actually made it to a second and third record.

"Two kick-ass rockers, "Destined to Die" and "Wake It Up, Shake It Up", fly solo among a bunch of overblown boogie-rockers and half-baked Southern biker rock. At times sounds kinda like the so-so first side of OTT bikers The Godz's debut album, but lacks any of that record's ferocious second side bite. The real deal-breaker here though is the production, featuring horns and back-up chorus girls on all but the best songs ..." --sayeth someone on Rate Your Music, pretty accurately. I don't remember who the producer was but the approach was moronic in the context of what the band was like live.

"Too Wild to Tame" -- their best song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_MwihQSO50

Hang around for Dirty Dan Buck pulling the Hammond on top of himself, and the keyboard player trying to yank it off him with band in ful cry. Nice recovery. And what's that -- a short guy playing harmonica, blown out by the rest of the band?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fioT7ws-AKU

CD reissue of the album, now out of print, going for 80+ dollars on Amazon, stupid money.

There was Iggy, back in the mists of time, with the rest of these guys -- doing bad languid blooz. The singer/harmonica player spawned allmusic.com

Eesh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MngsVYSd1C0

Big Balls and the Great White Idiot on YouTube, doing something from 1997's "The Big Waltz," which
is decribed by the band:

1997 followed with the Balls’ soundtrack for the cinema film „Die Mutter des Killers“ (the killer’s mother). This film received the best award of the „Münchner Filmfestspiele“ (Munich film festival) and subsequently became a long-running success in cinema and television. The soundtrack was released as „The Big Waltz“ on CD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViBBk06xIKI

Stick around for the shot of the girl kicking some guy soundly in the balls.

For Germans, I still think they sound astonishingly like an Aussie fightin' bar rock band.