Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

xpost

You just crushed me out of an explication on why the Good Rats ... were good. But they never made any albums as good as Silverhead's [i]16 & Savaged[i] or Detective's two.

It's not just being smart.

Smart is annoying when it dances too much beyond love of hard rock,
becoming only an instrument of contempt and satire. It's a very fine line -- it's hard to know when you've crossed it -- but -- every listener knows it when you've screwed it up.

However, Detective's two albums are what this thread was made for.

Unselfconscious funky hard rock, very heavy half of the time, urbane but greasy at a time critics would look back upon and say punk rock was hip over everything, exaggerating what was actually the condition.

This is so elusive a description, it slips through the fingers like mercury.

gorge, do you have that copperhead album? everyone needs that album. i like it way better than any silverhead. i always wanted to like silverhead more than i do. but i haven't played their 2nd album in a long long time. i should play it. every dollar bin has a detective album in it! anyone can be a fan.

No I don't. I've always wanted to hear it.

ILX swallowed my answer to the incoherent rubbish I just posted.

Detective's two albums are funky hard rock, hard to get accepted for after Humble Pie. Nothing immediately radio friendly on either of them but good songwriting nevertheless. It's enthusiastic
crunching rock and roll -- with classic Stonesy-Faces barrel house piano.

The Good Rats were like the Dictators without the craft to write classic American rock songbook tunes. Plus, they didn't have Ross the Boss. Ross the Boss is one of the ultimate American lead guitarists,
always spectacular, never in any band where the tunes pushed over the top. Everything the Good Rats did was elliptical.

with this 1981 Credit In Heaven double album I got by Minneapolis Twin/Tone band the Suburbs for 50 cents at a Goodwill here a few weeks ago -- even though the vinyl's sort of warped, so I can't play the first track and a half on any of the four sides! Anyway, I'd call their sound sort of post-punk funk with prog and even Contortiony no wave tendencies

Christ, I had all this immediately when I was doing a fanzine at Lehigh. It was difficult to swallow with a smile.

Flee, flee!

The Suburbs ate it entirely with respect to this thread. They were not the fluid of Milwaukee's
finest.

If you were there, you initially thought they were cool. Really. I did. Until I heard an album
of it. Fuck me, I'd rather hear 60 minutes of Louie, Louie.

There was a lot of stuff on Twin-Tone which I bought religously. More fool me -- or a reflection
of how much many were desiring more humanity and backbone in their hard rock.

My ex-wife might have liked the Suburbs. That could also be slander.

I think Twisted Sister borrowed the Good Rats' drummer at some point. Joe Franco.

the nuns, the mutants, pearl harbor & the explosions, new math, the units, romeo void, wire train, red rockers, pop-o-pies. they don't make labels like that one anymore

OTM. I only loved half the records here. My ex-wife liked the other half. Me: the Nuns ( I thought that was Posh Boy), Pop-O-Pies, Red Rockers and Pearl Harbour.

415 put out the first nuns single/ep. in 78 or 79.

Ha, my wife and I just had a discussion the other morning about how we can get ahold of a copy of the Pop-O-Pies' White EP, with "The Catholics Are Attacking" and those two "Truckin'" covers and the song about donuts with extra grease for the chief of police on it, before they went and turned into Faith No More. Not sure why I ever got rid of my copy in the first place. Will keep you posted. Still do have Pearl Harbour and the Explosions' album of course though. (Plus Pearl's first solo album.) Also should mention to Glenn that I've listened to the CD reissue of the first Swimming Pool Q's album twice this month. Not hard rock at all, but I like that too. Way more than their later album with, uh, a horse on the cover I think that I found a copy a couple years back. (Also, yeah, I was going to make a Good Rats/Dictators comparison myself before George did, and didn't get around to it. The Good Rats obviously don't survive that one-on-one well. Then again, who would?)

(The Mutants I know were the Detroit ones, who did "So American" where they quoted Steve Miller on cheeseburgers. Were they on 415, though?)

Anglofoppish vocal affectations[i]

Re the Suburbs, perfect reason to lift the needle, since they weren't actually as good as genuine Anglo-fopps. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel come to mind. The Suburbs never made records as good as [I]The Psychomodo or "Judy Teen" or "Man It Was Mean". And those weren't exactly top tier.

Busier maybe. Busy has never grabbed me.

I'd have to say the demographic searching for it liked Audience's House On the Hill a lot more, too.

i was a big fan of the self-titled swimming pool q's record, bought it on cassette and played it until my college roommates said 'turn that shit off, we want to get laid sometime'

http://www.boikot-underground.com/images/Ac-dc_Flick_of_the_Switch.jpg

this really has to be considered the last *great* AC/DC record (although I like all of them since then, I am a life-long diehard.)

'Flick of the Switch' is SO much better than 'For Those About To Rock'. FTATR has like nothing except the of course majestic title track. But the rest? filler. 'Flick of the Switch' -> whole first side is amazing, no filler. Last time that you could ever say that about an AC/DC album side. "Rising Power" an awesome first-track. Then "This House Is On Fire" comes on which is basically a Rolling Stones track. Listening to it again now, I realize why the AC/DC guys bristle at being called a 'heavy metal' band by various journalists. In their mind, they've always been a "rock and roll" band. and "This House Is On Fire" totally affirms that, just a Stonesy-rocker (just with a way-more rigid drum track than Watts would have done.)

"Flick of the Switch" is an incredible single, better than that overblown "For Those About to Rock". and then .. "Nervous Shakedown". wow, what a track. This album was basically my first real introduction to AC/DC. I sorta knew who they were? I was 11 in 1983. After listening to CKLW for most of my life, I was slowly venturing into the rock stations like WRIF, WLLZ, and WIOT (Toledo, Ohio). I think it was WIOT in Toledo that caned the fuck out of "Nervous Shakedown" in 1983. Man, that song scared me , it sounded so heavy and insanely menacing, at least for mainstream rock radio anyway. Bought the 'Flick of the Switch' album, it's been a perennial fave ever since. I'm not gonna say it's the last *great* AC/DC album -- I think 'Blow Up Your Video' is a contender -- but man, it rules.

ha, I see where I said this was the last great one and then that 'Video' could be in the mix. Well, I do love them both. This is probably better than 'Video', just because the production is so crisp, live, and amazing on 'Flick of the Switch'. For 'Video', they went back to Vanda and Young which seemingly would be an awesome move, but there is something kinda flat about it to me. Although, I own 'Flick' on LP and I own 'Video' on CD. I need to get the LP of the latter, i think..

in any case, 'Video' was like 10 times better than 'Fly on the Wall'

oh , the other cool thing is that, on the vinyl at least, Atlantic used the old school R&B label logo, just like they did on all of the J. Geils Band LPs

surgery EP on circuit records. really digging it. chuck must have reviewed it for creem metal, right?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5hZizn5Q1tM/SrF_jQeqxFI/AAAAAAAAA4E/8NLUcampH_M/s200/R-458978-1148643564.jpg

(Continuing the non-hard-rock SPQ digression: the one with the horse was Blue Tomorrow, their third. I hate half of the songs, and the other half are my favorite SPQs things by far. The self-titled one was the second, Deep End was the first. I love them when they went for drama, hated them when they went for twang. Anne Richmond Boston had an underrated solo album at some point, too.)

(Oh, and Guadalcanal Diary, they're another band in that group for me.)

Bunch of things:

Had no idea people felt so passionately about the Suburbs, both pro-and con-. I figured everybody would just say "who??" Shows what I know. Anyway, George is probably right about the them not being as good as Cockney Rebel (I've only heard one album by each in my life, I think, so I'm not much of a judge), but I was probably at least a little off on the Anglofop crack. They sure look like Anglofops, at least on the back cover, but sounds like the Suburb singer is going more for a David Byrne deadpan, the more I listen, and I'm guessing Talking Heads must've influenced their funk proclivities at least a little. (They both sing about women's hips, too.) But George is definitely right about the "busy" part. At least on the album I got, they have a real prog/art-rock conception of "funkiness" -- musically, it actually reminds me of the Tubes' funk moves quite sometimes. I like it the same way. As for Glenn's comparisons, I think I get now why he mentioned the Call -- it's possible I've only ever heard two Call songs (never gave them any thought at all -- were they any good??), but one was "The Walls Come Down," and the Suburbs have this song "Faith" that not only sounds similar but actually features the repeated line "The walls come tumbling down," two years before the Call one. Just saying. (I've never heard the later, slicker stuff that Scott and Glenn say they hit with, unless I heard it and didn't know it.)

International Discography Of The New Wave lists two different bands called the Mutants. The SF ones who were on 415 are different than the Detroit ones whose "So American" 7-inch I used to own and like.

The song I remember liking a lot on Flick Of The Switch back in the '80s (when I used to own it) was "Bedlam And Belgium," though I'm not sure I'd say the same today. Did think that was an okay album at the time. Also kinda loved "Let's Get It Up" off Those About To Rock and "Sink The Pink" off Fly On The Wall once upon a time.

Deep End is the Swimming Pool Q's album I like; Blue Tomorrow struck me as meh. I may well prefer their twang to their drama.

Anybody care about Kevin Coyne? Eccentric British guy, early '80s. The one album I have, In Living Black And White from 1973, is a live one; his guitarist plays pretty loud rock, though his band doesn't much -- come closest in "Eastbourne Ladies" and "Mummy," maybe. He has a Joe Cocker growl that occasionally sounds a little Ian Hunter, but he doesn't seem to have much in the way of tunes. (Maybe the studio albums are more tuneful, I dunno.) Sings about insane asylums (used to work in one according the liner notes), suicidal fat girls, burning down the world with turpentine, America being a land of disease, and British class stuff I don't understand much. Don't know what to make of the guy.

Oops, early '70s I meant for Coyne, not '80s. (At least the stuff I know of.)

Uh...just noticed that the loud guitarist is Andy Summers, six years before the Police's debut album. (Wiki says John Lydon was also a fan.)

oh yeah, big fan of the Coyne. saw him at a small club in Chicago just a couple years before his death. he's quirky. I like his take on things. the working in the insane asylum apparently had a huge effect on him, because yeah it's one of his big themes. and yeah, Andy Summers was in his band for a while. I dig his solo stuff but it's not usually all that "rocking". Better to check out the two Siren LPs, on Elektra in the states. TOTALLY rocking.

(uh, Siren being the band that he was lead singer for, before going solo)

I was listening to the Kevin Coyne & Siren box, from John Peel's Dandylion label, last night. It's almost all old country blues, R&B and late Sixties pub boogie. Definitely a bit of a very poor man's Joe Cocker voice wise. Makes up for it with storytelling and lyrics. Some of it's very country folk blues idiom, intimate and approachable. "Ze Ze Ze Ze" is something to hear in a bar room.

There are a couple old videos of festival and Beeb appearances on YouTube. "Strange Locomotion", from a Rainbow show shows a young Summers on guitar. It's stomping Brit R&boogie. "Eastbourne Ladies" -- which is the song Rotten liked -- is another boogie, performed in front of a festival audience in the Sevenites. More boogie with the guys and gals bopping in a polite hippies we're-having-a-party-in-Blighty
way. Camera pans back to show it's next to a pasture, the cows grazing unperturbed. Coyne has a pair of Walter Brennan 'real McCoy' farm pants on, humps a pole a little. This was back when you could look real crappy and the crowd loved you for it.

"House On the Hill" is a compelling country folk whine about what a local insane asylum is like. Really captures a bleak part of English life. That's from a solo double album, "Marjory Razorblade" which I've not yet digested in its entirety.

andy summers does good stuff on that one double album by The Animals. Love Is. he got around back then.

i think i had one bad kevin coyne album experience and never looked for anything else. this was years ago. and years ago i used to confuse him with kevin ayers. now, kevin ayers, i know i like.

i think the album i had was matching head and feet. which also had andy summers on it. maybe i'd like it now.

"Eastbourne Ladies" is def a high point. Coyne's whining nasal voice in a kind of "Highway 61 Revisited" thing, except about high class dames who look nice. Do they go to bed wearing crowns?

"Holiday in Spain" is a spoof on Brit package holidays to the title country, flamenco beat, the Spaniard waiting on the table looks like a gangster from an evil side of town. "Jackie and Edna" about going to some dire British shore resort, pining for someone in an adulterous affair.

"Marlene" classic rock boogie with a central 'like a rolling stone' organ -- along with "Eastbourne Ladies," one of the recording's party shuffle tunes amid the desperate thin screams and folk blues. A lot of it this has an off Van Morrison quality. I think Ian Hunter was probably a fan as there's a 'stocks and shares' line in "Nasty" which sounds like it was pinched for Mott the Hoople. "Nasty" talks about his wife or girlfriend who makes him wear a dress, perhaps figuratively rather than literally.

Quite a good album as a sometimes taste. Coyne gets the country folk blues complaints going, always follows after awhile with a thumping piece of R&B pub rock, like "Chicken Wing."

It would be a hard person who wouldn't break out laughing during "Karate King," 'his white and muscled flexing at all the passing girls, smashing his way through the window frame, ripping apart his mother's pearls -- they're lieing on the dressing table ... Chop! Chop!"

"If you see the Karate King. Help him! Help him! Comment on his pommaded hair, tell him he would have been an excellent kamikaze pilot in the Second World War! That's what he wants to hear ... in the gymnasium."

Priceless, really.

"Good Boy" --- "Good boy! Good boy! Well done! Good boy! You're just a lickspittle! Lickspittle! Lickspittle! Lickspittle!"

Know we know why Johnny Rotten liked this. Entire portions of the record tear at the British class and compartmentalization thing. One understands immediately why Coyne could never have any significant number of fans in the US.

I'd pay real money to see someone perform "Good Boy" and "Karate King" before a country festival audience at an ag fair.

I have to say xhuxk and stormy bringing up Kevin Coyne has serendipitously been a fine thing. I'm enjoying this stuff and I literally had no idea.

Glad to be of service -- though now I've clearly got some Coyne catching-up to do myself.

And now another '70s cult act (except maybe in their own country, where I get the idea they were a lot bigger than "cult") whose live album that I've got I suspect doesn't stack up to studio LPs I don't have: Gasolin', from Denmark. Been playing their 1976 double-live Sadan, and while you never doubt that the spirit is there, given the loose playing on-stage and less-than-stellar recording it's not so easy to figure out how well-formed or even rocking the songs are. They definitely liked rock'n'roll, back to the '50s variety: you can detect subliminal Chuck Berry influences here and there, and they cover Little Richard's "Keep A Knockin'." Yet there's no doubt they're a '70s arena band in sound -- just not sure whether that means glam, prog, boogie, or what. The fact that they mostly sing in a foreign language doesn't help the issue much; in fact, who they mostly remind me of is that East German band from the same time, Puhdys, who were known to do entire albums of '50s oldies on occasion. At least a couple of songs eventually click, though -- the medley of "Fi-Fi Dong/Inga, Katinka Og Smukke Charlie Pa Sin Harley" (catchiest thing on the record I think, and one of two originals with "Charlie" in the title) could be their equivalent of Chris Spedding's "Motor Bikin'". And "Refrainet Er Frit" on the fourth side convinces me they were most likely Slade fans -- they look pretty darn salt-of-the-earth backstage on the back cover, too. I get the idea more songs might sink in if I gave it more time.

Christgau gave their self-titled LP from the same year (which apparently came out in the States on Epic) an A-, but he mentions "the musicianship and symphonic textures of Yurropean technopomp," which I'm not hearing so much of on the live one -- the arrangements feel big enough, but not quite complex or majestic to read "prog" to my ears, not even in say a Golden Earring sense, though that band might still be another point of comparison. (Jasper/Oliver call Gasolin' "a strange mixture of hard rock -- early '70s style -- and weird European pop," which is intriuging but kinda vague.) Also Wiki lists a ton of Gasolin' LPs, and then more solo ones by Kim Larsen in the '80s (wasn't he marketed as new wave in the States? Or am I just remembering seeing a record ad in New York Rocker or somewhere?) So it's possible their sound changed somewhere along the line too, but I'm not sure how.

...Kim Larsen being their singer and a guitarist (they had two of the latter). Also, Japser/Oliver interestingly call the studio LPs spotty but recommend the live LP, which is the one I have. And they apparently still have enough fans that, from the looks of the links on their Wiki discography page, all their albums get individual Wiki page writeups -- hardly a given for even big American '70s hard rock bands.

(Re: The Call. I liked them a lot in the early years, when they were sort of like a U2 that stuck with New Wave. "Walls Came Down", their first bit hit, is from album 2, Modern Romans, but my favorites are the next two, Scene Beyond Dreams and Reconciled. After that they got mixed up with Robbie Robertson and tried to go gruff and soulful, which lost me. Leader Michael Been's son is the lead guy in Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.)

Back to actual past-expiry hard-rock, I was just looking through my records to see what bands, if any, I've liked pretty much unchanged (I mean, my liking of them has endured, and they have endured) since I started taking notes in about 1985. Rush are close, if only I liked the last couple records more. Black Sabbath can't quite count, with all the singer-changes and now the name-change. So the winner?

UFO.

Hearing way more Faces and Humble Pie on the second Detective album (It Takes One To Know One from '77) than I'd noticed the first, and it's just a more consistent album in general -- and right, they're dressed even more disco on the cover. Hearing "Help Me Up" and the appropriately funky "Betcha Won't Dance" as the most undeniable Faces rips; "Dynamite," more Humble Pie, locks itself into the album's best pocket. "Competition" reminded me of Rose Tattoo in their Faces mode (maybe just wishful thinking?); "Something Beautiful" has some Rod Stewart in its singing but it's just as much a Yes ballad, thanks to Kaye's fancy keys. And they save the two most swinging Zepalikes (as good as Fastway at least), "Fever" and "Tear Jerker," 'til the very end.

....Though actually Popoff claims "Competition" and "Dynamite" are the real Zep rips, and "Betcha Won't Dance" is mere "flippant party rock," so maybe my ears were screwed on wrong when listening. Unless his were.

So what do people think and/or know about Cock Sparrer? I don't think anything; probably used to have a couple cuts on oi! compilations, but I can't say they left a huge impression. But they were around since 1972, supposedly, which seems interesting. Also, they were apparently known to spar with cocks. Anyway, Home Blitz (which is basically Daniel DiMaggio of Princeton, NJ, who used to intern for me at the Voice and who wrote a couple reviews back then and who used to post occasionally on ILM) cover Cock Sparrer's "Is Anybody There?" (the original of which I don't think I've heard, but which seems to be about not getting to play on Top of the Pops), and give it powerpop jangle guitars out of the Searchers' "Needles And Pins" thus turning it into a zero-fidelity version of of maybe a Dwight Twilley or Bram Tchaicovsky song but with march beats in the middle on their new Out Of Phase album, and I like it. Also kinda like the other Jonathan Richman-whiney exurban no-fi nerd pop with intermittent late Flaming Groovies guitar parts Dan does, for instance one about driving scenically on Route 18 (toward Rutgers in New Brunswick maybe?), and I don't even mind that Home Blitz stick a couple quiet little noise-artfuckery interludes between tracks where it sounds like they're wheeling carts around the studio and breaking glass. No songs about baseball this time, but the label is Richie Records, the logo of which seems to be inspired by Richie Allen. Predict George and Phil would hate it, but there's a good chance Scott might like it a lot. No idea what Frank would think, but I'd be curious.

The Myspace lists Game Theory (?) and Big Star among their influences:

http://www.myspace.com/homeblitz

Something I wrote about them a couple years ago:

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2008/07/hometown-heroes-do-the-ballroom-blitz.html

Also been liking the new album by Eddy Current Supression Ring from Melbourne, who also have tasty guitar jangle parts though probably not enough of a rhythm section, and also sound like regular guys singing about regular stuff regular people do. Album is Rush To Relax, on Goner. Not buying the Marquee Moon comparisons other people have supposedly made, but maybe I will someday. Previous album reminded me of Feedtime and Screaming Blue Messiahs; this one sounds spacier. My hunch is that that makes it not quite as good, but I could be wrong.

Their myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/eddycurrentsuppressionring

What I wrote about their last one:

http://www.spin.com/reviews/eddy-current-suppression-ring-primary-colours-goner

Also, Legendary Shack Shakers probably belong on this thread (well, for referencing past expiry hard rock at least) as on the country one. Here are some notes I wrote about their new one there. (For more on the new Shooter Jennings album, which is definitely way more loud rock than country, just not really all that good at it, back up a few posts):

Rolling Country 2010

Legendary Shack Shake myspace (might take a while to load, but the blog entries part has an extensive rundown of old "guitar-oriented stuff" they say they've been listening to, like Willie Dixon for instance):

http://www.myspace.com/legendaryshackshakers

For instance, implying that a sinister ruling cabal wants to turn America into a police state: that’s provocative, if unoriginal in rock. (Police states were the major concern of hard-core punk in the 1980s.) Borrowing, as Mr. Jennings does in “Summer of Rage,” a segment of a taped speech by Myron Fagan, the cold-war conspiracy theorist who believed that the Illuminati controlled the media and that desegregation was a communist plot: that’s unwise, at best. Using the speech as background in a rock threnody for the end of civilization with drum machine, rampant echo and weeping trumpet: that’s hilarious.

“Summer of Rage” is followed shortly by “The Illuminated,” with Walpurgisnacht Floyd riffs, clip-clop percussion and Autotune bombast, ending in air-raid siren. Illuminati ... Illuminated ... are we on to something? Dunno. The whole record is vaguely about coming to realize that you can’t trust anyone but your mother

Got this from your link on RC 2010.

So Shooter Jennings is a Tea Partier and one of the more fringy ones, at that. I'd get the record to see if it has the usual Bilderberg/Skull & Bones/Council on Foreign Relations stuff -- which always seems to accompany the Illuminati, too -- but "rampagingly awful" is too big a putdown to sacrifice a few bucks on.

You know these guys would be doing rock opera's based on the The Turner Diaries if they thought they could get away with it. And it just hadn't inconveniently been written by a neo-Nazi and the hang and shoot all the people of color part had just been buried a little more with regards to blowing up government buildings, killing the tyrants and taking the atheists off to concentration camps.

Ah, don't have to get the album. The big magilla -- the overlords, the CFR, big Alex Jones fan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvHEmTiFEts&feature=related

The Runaways movie soundtrack album. Glam record of semi-stuff, some of it bad

1. Nick Gilder - "Roxy Roller"
2. Suzi Quatro - "The Wild One"
3. MC5 - "It's A Man's Man's Man's World"
4. David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel"
5. Dakota Fanning - "Cherry Bomb"
6. The Runaways - "Hollywood"
7. Dakota Fanning - "California Paradise"
8. The Runaways - "You Drive Me Wild"
9. Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart - "Queens Of Noise"
10. Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning - "Dead End Justice"
11. The Stooges - "I Wanna Be Your Dog"
12. The Runaways - "I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are (Live)"
13. Sex Pistols - "Pretty Vacant"
14. Joan Jett - "Don't Abuse Me"

MC5's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" is James Brown, I think, and you know why they picked it. But this is one no one's gonna want to listen to more than once.

One usually picks a really cool number to start off. So it's a mystery why Nick Gilder is here. Well, no, it's probably not. It's probably used for an early seen hanging out at the Roxy.

I'll be interested in hearing the updated version of "Dead End Justice" since it's basically half
a really poorly acted skit. Which I originally thought lent unintended charm to the number.

"He beat me with a board/It felt just like a sword."

Ogden Nash'd be proud.

I can't help but think Dakota Fanning is in this because of "The Secret Life of Bees."

Hey, for xhuxk, check the 'songs about prostitution' thread for the youtube steal of Armand Schaubroek's "Ratfucker." Did the Tubes' Young and Rich just drip that or vice versa or not? Rhetorical question, obviously.

I can definitely hear a connection. That and the Kevin Coyne song that George sent me a youtube link to today, "Good Boy," both have lots of crazy musical force to them, vocal and otherwise. Both mainly....rants, I guess. Have never actually heard Shaubroeck (Steals) before, I don't think, though I've been hearing about him forever. How good was he?

Lots of Coyne here, if anybody's interested:

http://kevincoyne.blogspot.com/

Also, I actually do like "Roxy Roller" -- though maybe more so in the Sweeney Todd version, featuring Bryan "Guy" Adams. (Actually like Nick Gilder in general, and appreciate the contribution he made in keeping glam rock alive in Vancouver in the mid to late '70s when it apparently had died most everywhere else, thus paving the way for Streetheart.)

Pulled out Fanny's Fanny Hill from 1972, and it definitely had more organic boogie dirt beneath its nails than that later post-touring-band album I talked about a bunch of posts above. But I'm not sure that makes me like it more, to be honest. Their version of "Hey Bulldog" fucking kills kills kills, and the the first couple songs on Side One ("Ain't That Peculiar" cover and "Knock On My Door") have some okay thump to them, and "Rock Bottom Blues" is a decent midway point between pop boogie and pop glam even if its opening does remind me too much of "Your Mama Don't Dance" by Loggins & Messina (same year.) But lots of the rest just sounds too frigging hippified for my taste -- you can really hear the lesbian-folk boat about to roll ashore in June Millington's ballads. She even has one called "Think About The Children," for God's sake, and she's not joking! Guess the gospel backup and bullfight bolero horns in the closer "The First Time" should be interesting on paper, but I could live without them, too. So I dunno.

Occurred to me that the first Home Blitz album from a couple years back and Cheap Trick's Latest album from last year have something in common in that, in both cases, the best track was a lesser-known Slade cover: "My Town" and "When The Lights Are Out," respectively. (I wound up liking the Home Blitz set more myself, but I get why some wouldn't.)

Got an archival CD by a St. Louis band called Raymilland in the mail today: Recordings '79-'81. Theoretically "post-punk", and definitely sounds like brainy kids playing with their chemistry kits a lot (think I stole that from Frank), but who its melodies and singing keep bringing to mind for me is actually the Bizarros, for some reason.

Alex Jones's Wiki page lists KRS-One and Willie Nelson as also having appeared on his show; I definitely heard Dave Mustaine on there a month or two ago too. My car dial always seem to land on the show on Saturday afternoons, for some reason. Jones is based here; not clear to me whether he's as big a radio presence anywhere else -- but in general, I get the idea Austin counts as some kind of conspiracy-theory capital. The mood here just feels conducive to that kind of thinking, somehow. Lotsa Ron Paul stickers around, still. Theoretically outlaw city that's been home to aging hippies with fried brainpains for decades ("keep Austin weird") in an archetypally right-libertarian cowboy state that wants to indoctrinate Christianity and creationism in school history and science classes, so no big surprise. Neither was Joe Stack, maybe.

Some maniac posted almost an entire 12/23/72 Grand Funk Railroad concert on YouTube. Enjoy! http://bit.ly/g_f_r

got the moses cd reissue on shadoks and i'm really digging it. very cool danish power trio. only made one album. love the arrangements and production. some cream, some sabbath, you know the drill. but definitely worth a spin or five. phil, you would dig it. i think.

http://psychedelic-music.com/GIF/Moses.gif

(one of those albums i'd always heard about but never got around to hearing till now.)

mentioned the "official" reissues of amazing african psych records by witch and amanaz on the reissues thread, but i feel like i should mention them again since i can't stop playing them. the witch album *lazy bones!!* definitely belongs here. hard and heavy zambian psych/hard rock.

http://www.exiledrecords.com/shop/images/witchlazybones.jpg

I got those African albums - Witch and Amanaz - in the mail this weekend, and really didn't like them as much as I'd hoped to. Nigerian rock bands (BLO, Moussa Doumbia and Ofo the Black Company in particular) just stomp all over 'em. More fuzz, wilder rhythms, over-the-top vocals...the Nigerians had everyone beat in the '70s. I think I had that Moses disc at one point, too, but it kinda slid under a pile of other stuff.

i think the amanaz is sublime. and a wonderful psych album. as far as witch goes, let's just say that i'm pretty easy to please as far as 70's hard rock goes and its got some cool moments.

Count me among those who think there is a ruling elite of some sort and that it's worth investigating the visible organs of power (e.g., the CFR), that it's not ridiculous to talk about the risk of the U.S. becoming a police state given the extent to which our rights have been trampled on in recent years (continuing into the current administration), that the revolving door between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve is more than a little troubling, etc., etc. The people I relate to the least are the ones who feel not outrage about anything and seem incapable of imagining how fucked we actually are.

(But no, not a fan of Alex Jones.)

I guess this is just crazy conspiracy theory too.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006/

And I guess it reflect poorly on me that I wonder why the corporate media has almost completely left this story untouched.

She started her own website, incidentally:

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/

But lots of the rest just sounds too frigging hippified for my taste -- you can really hear the lesbian-folk boat about to roll ashore in June Millington's ballads.

You need to dig out Mother's Pride too. You should see all the pics in the Rhino Handmade box. They really did drip that rock hippie house off Sunset vibe where Lowell George would come to teach 'em to play slide and everyone would hang vibe. My only gripe is they could've been encouraged to inject more venom at a time when the guys were certainly doing it.

Don't have any Mother's Pride; decided instead to go full-on early '70s pre-fab in order to clear all that hippie fiber from my guts: The Wild Thing album by Fancy (who I used to get confused with Fanny oddly enough -- and yeah Scott, I've always mixed up Ayers and Coyne too), on Big Tree Records (also home of Brownsville Station for some years there), from 1974. Title-track Troggs cover was a #14 hit; followup single "Touch Me" where the girl in the band tries to sound al sexy, went #14. Don't think I've ever heard either of those songs on the radio. Apparently they were British, and maybe it's possible they actually played live sometimes, but they sound like such a disco-forecasting studio concoction they make the band on the first Ram Jam album seem like, uh, the Grateful Dead. Liner notes: "Wild Thing, an old song, a new version, a chart record. Fancy, a New Band, great guys, fantastic chick. Don't listen to this ecord alone, it takes two to...Tango?" Four good-looking people probably in their twenties on the cover, two trying to look tough in their leather jackets, one who looks more a junior professor type, and a blonde squeezed into cut off jean shorts. All conceivably on cocaine, or hoping to look like they are.

Lots of cowbells and congas all over, but also chunky bubblegum hard rock riffs -- really, given this was England, maybe not far from Chinn and Chapman's early works for the Sweet (or maybe even Chicory Tip or somebody more mysteriously Brit like that), though here the producer and principal songwriter turns out to be some guy named Mike Hurst (who Wiki explains had earlier produced Brit hits for the Move and Manfred Mann, and later managed Shakin' Stevens and discovered Samantha Fox.)

Catchiest non-singles are probably Fancy's clueless bid for mid-American high school parking lots sock-hop nostalgia number "Move On," extremely Diddleyfied "Between The Devil And Me," and percussive closer "Feel Good," none of which one recalls much else about once they end. Okay, just found this on last.fm: "Fancy is a British white funk band of the 1970’s most famous for their cover of the Trogg’s 'Wild Thing,' a single which went gold in the U.S. Former Penthouse pet Helen Court sang steamily, Rick Fenwick ex-of the Spencer Davis Group played guitar, Mo Foster bass, Henry Spinetti drums and Alan Hawkshaw keyboards. Fancy released several subsequent albums replacing Court with Annie Cavanaugh from the cast of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, but failed to regain the same success." So there you go.

Finally, fwiw, I definitely think there is some middle ground between believing that all is for the best in the best of all possible words and thinking Boxcar Willie was a lizard person. But that's just me.

Actually "Touch Me" went #19, oops. (And then in 1986, Samantha Fox had her first hit, also named "Touch Me," which went #4. Coincidence?)

Also meant "Don't listen to this record...," obv. (And didn't mean to imply Chapman/Chinn produced Chicory Tip; that came out wrong. Also don't think Fancy get anywhere near as catchy as the Sweet.)

i love the fancy wild thing cover. i have the 45. i need the album. or i want to hear it at least. i'll find one out there.