Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

I had heard some of his blues stuff and knew JGW did funk in the 70s, but this record is quite cool. It definitely holds up well with some p-funk or bootsie.

really turned off to Shooter now. dang

Reflects a lot of his audience and upbringing, I suppose. Although he spent a lot of time in an unsuccessful LA glam band.

Article on Daniel Davies and his band, Year Long Disaster, in today's LA Times. In an inauspicious start, it devotes a good third of its length to the lede which is on how Daniel Davies is a remarkable van driver, able to get across the country in three days.

No idea what the music sounds like from the piece except it's loud hard rock, nothing like Dave Davies' guitar playing and the impression that Davies and his son don't like each other too much, now living on opposite sides of the world. New album threatened on Monday. Anyone heard it?

It was an interesting read, something someone spent time on, as opposed to Tuscaloosa Ann's bit on Jimi Hendrix on Saturday. What would Jimi have thought of hip hop? Would he "have had a hand in inventing
it?" If you ever wondered about the evidence for a deity, then Tuscaloosa Ann on Jimi Hendrix is good evidence of god playing a little bit of a practical joke.

speaking of canada, picked up hammersmith's second album tonight for the princely sum of two dollars. 1976. i dig it. some proggy flourishes and a six minute song called "under the sea", but mostly just short sweet hard rock songs and some pop rock stuff a la styx. two guitarists. they never really stretch out and jam for long, but the sound they make is satisfying.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_xQ-zn51BoTk/ReEXXk2q14I/AAAAAAAAADM/vywWtJJ0gBQ/s320/cover.jpg

Heard the 75 debut last year, liked it. The usual good slice of meat and potatoes Canadian hard rock.
Here's what I thought at the time.

Way better odds is Hammersmith's debut from '75. Canadian undercard party rock band. "Late Loving Man" is BTO cowbell rock, "Money Rock" same funky and tongue-in-cheek style as Joe Walsh would be doing on Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet -- a really good song, maybe the best on the album.

"Nobody Really Knows Why the Sun Goes" -- Eagles Hotel California melancholia. In fact, on the chorus it sounds exactly like the Eagles, with heavier guitars.

Lots of funky hard rock on this, second hight point probably "Funky as She Goes," the
penultimate number. Again, this one is very Joe Walsh solo inflected, ripping off the riff "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" in the song's intro.

speaking of canada, listening to the 1978 debut by Aerial. Aerial was apparently a Beatles tribute band called Liverpool before they changed their name. so you can imagine what their album sounds like. very Beatles-y. i like it. they weren't a one-note power pop band though. lots of guitars, lots of synths and even mellotron and a song entitled "Indispensable Thomas Hensible" that i really like a lot.

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s19172.jpg

so, you know, if you are a klaatu fan, you would dig the aerial album.

just to prove that i can be mean and nasty on the internet i gotta warn men women and children away from the horrible new "space rock" album i got in the mail yesterday by someone calling himself "the flowers of hell". one guy and about a ZILLION other people playing everything except a jews harp and the spoons making the most tedious go nowhere sub-Spiritualized "orchestral" racket that i've heard in a long time. this is supposed to be "ambitious". or something. it actually makes the deadly boring Japanese crescendo-rock band Mono - who i can't stand - sound lively by comparison. yuck.

i had to play THREE humble pie records in a row just to get the taste of that cd out of my mouth.

Ted Nugent argues that his riding of a buffalo during shows is somehow different than
riding killer whales at SeaWorld for entertainment. Besides, he argues, he always carries a weapon onstage and can kill the buffalo with a quick shot to the head if it gets out of line. Remarkable if only for twice using the word 'snot' in the essay. Once was not enough?

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/08/i-love-animals-theyre-delicious//print/

I really wish the GOP would stop dicking around and work on Nugent as a potential next presidential candidate. How is he not better than Haley Barbour?

And, just for fun, I got mentioned in the WaTimes the same day.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/09/army-goes-mad-plots-ways-to-fight-fantastic-future//print/

Walk Through Fire, the new album by '80s UK metal act Raven, contains a not-bad (except for the awful vocals, vastly inferior to Sammy Hagar's) cover of Montrose's "Space Station #5." Also, Raven's current drummer is Joe Hasselvander, formerly of Pentagram.

Hey George, I actually listened to that Year Long Disaster album last week; like the earlier stuff I heard by them (their debut EP from 2005 anyway -- don't think I ever heard the previous full-length), I thought it was pretty good, but not distinctive enough to expect I'll ever put it on again. Anyway, here's the Rhapsody review I wrote of the new one:

http://www.rhapsody.com/year-long-disaster/black-magic-all-mysteries-revealed#albumreview

Looks like the new album also has "Show Me Your Teeth" on it, making it four years between muster.

I have an old Raven album on vinyl with Joe Hasselvander on drums. Guess he left and came back
years later. It's good you can always call up your old buds to help, I think.

Been mulling over Streetwalkers' Vicious But Fair ... Plus, a 'best of' sort of on See For
Miles from a year or so ago, maybe more.

I've never previously been able to sustain any interest in Streetwalkers for one LP, as proven when xhuxk brought 'em up last year.

Here's xhuxk:

Anybody (esp George) have any thoughts on either Streetwalkers or the Steve Gibbons Band -- stodgy blues-rock groups with smart reps from pre-punk mid '70s England, led by gruff tough guys said to be at least mildly eccentric? Neither band put a single album in the Billboard 200. Critics in general at the time seem to have found them both passable, for what that's worth (not much I know), but I never gave them much thought til I bought both their debut LPS for $1 each a few weeks back.

Streetwalkers' 1975 self-titled LP really isn't sinking in. Some decent guitar parts ("Crawfish" vaguely reminds me of "Green Eyed Lady" or "Black Magic Woman"), and I like the funky talk box in the opening "Downtown Flyers," but if Roger Chapman had a personality beyond being just another post-Cocker coot, I'm not hearing it. Maybe it kicked in on later albums. Here, the songs just don't seem
memorable

Me:

There's a lot of Streetwalkers floating around in the usual rip off joints, too, not that it matters. (Vicious But Fair and Red Card) Some of it even streamed, reminding me it was everything I thought it wasn't.

=====

Re Streetwalkers: If you liked Family, you might like them. For me Family was an often iffy
proposition. Hey, early Euro-art, mostly rock format, dramatic but almost no roll.

Streetwalksrs were supposed to be even more rock. What they were was louder. I had Red Card which was the one which have the most obvious interest for people on this thread. Couldn't write songs, definitely not at all like Aerosmith, almost no groove. Loud and oblique with Roger Chapman. Sometimes painful and easy to ignore or immediately take off, unintentionally so.

Vicious But Fair ... Plus is VBC plus half of Red Card[i] and half of [i]Downtown Flyers, which was the debut, I think.

Nicko McBain drums on about half of it.

VBC is the most ignorable. It has one good bar room rock/hard rock spurt that doesn't make me work at remembering it, "Can't Come In." Qualifies as heavy pub rock, something Count Bishops fans would have liked.

But the rest of the album isn't that good. Honestly, some of it reminds me of the first couple albums Genesis made with Phil Collins more directly aping Peter Gabriel.

"Gypsy Moon" is good, singer/songwriter/Doobie Bros 'oh, black water'-type stuff. Not hard rock, something you'd find the style of on all the Black Crowes records you didn't pay attention to but which probably had one or two good tunes on. It's one of the pieces from Downtown Flyers.

The title cut is funky hard rock with voice box and vocoder and it defines a repeating thread in Streetwalkers albums, the desire to be funky with black women singers, sort of like Humble Pie's Blackberries, adding color while Roger Chapman tries to hold up the other end. He almost can but it's still English and if you liked PFunk or Mothers Finest, US bands, this would probably not do much to ya.

"Crawfish" is one of the better hard rockers, seems to take about half of Chicago Transit Authority's
"I'm a Man"

Half of Red Card is here, allegedly the most artistic and best hard rock, sometimes early metal, type thing. Only two songs from four are worth coming back to, "Crazy Charade" and "Shotgun Messiah."
"Decadence Code" sounds like the early Phil Collins/Genesis mix and a cover of "Dady Rolling Stone" is something you might have found years later on a Black Crowes album if the BCs were Britishes.

What's that hit, somewhere between 25 and 33 percent? I can remember more of it now that I've listened to it over and over a few times.

Roger Chapman, eccentric immediately gripping voice, as a singer he never lets up. Charlie Whitney, great tasty guitar player, lays back a little more than maybe the record's needed. Nicko McBain on drums, doing work less distinguished than when he was drumming for Pat Travers and Rory Gallagher briefly. Bobby Tench, who was the Seventies version of Lenny Kravitz -- everyone thought he was destined for stardom when he fronted the Jeff Beck group but you couldn't have a Lenny Kravitz back then so .... adds a little soul here and there, content mainly playing guitar.

Given the names and the regard with which the individuals were held, an underachiever with moments.

really digging Diamond Reo's debut last night.

...Not to be confused with the '90s pop-country band Diamond Rio (who I've always assumed were pretty lame), right? Except by me, until right this second. (I don't think I've ever heard an album by either of them.)

you would LOVE the first diamond reo album, chuck. great stuff. recorded in pittsburgh.

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s370130.jpg

I had both of those. Always thought the first was better than the second which was way harder but suffered a bit for it. Norman Nardini band.

what do y'all think of Argent? I've been digging their S/T, Ring of Hands and In Deep albums. heavier than I remembered, w/swirling keyboards and celestial harmonies.

Russ Ballard was hard to beat as a songwriter. Between the hard pop rock with hooks he wrote and the more progressive material Rod Argent liked, they covered quite a bit of ground. The Ballard material is what everyone remembers, "Hold Your Head Up," "God Gave Rock 'n' Roll to You," "Liar" which became a hit for 3 Dog Night, "It's Only Money." They even redid "Time of the Season." Even heavy longer stuff like "I Am the Dance of Ages" sounded good.

If you don't mind having your old-school hard-glam energy crossed with modern production and some goth lasciviousness, check out the new HIM album, Screamworks. It's not Humble Pie or anything (it's not humble anything), but if you're the kind of person who notices Ratt on a new-release list, HIM might be worth at least a couple :30 samples. Start with track 1...

Not bad.

http://www.mtv.com/videos/dakota-fanning-featuring-kristen-stewart/490989/cherry-bomb.jhtml

wait, i can't remember, did you go see the runaways movie, gorge?

i don't think i need to see it. i'll bet its not as good as light of day. joan jett should have won an oscar for that movie.

listening to george brigman all day. i can just listen to his records over and over in the store and i'm fine.

No, not yet. Hasn't opened nationwide. March 19, maybe in Pasadena. Going to go in the afternoon to see what the pensioners make of it.

So have we ever discussed Y & T here? I actually don't think I've ever heard their late '70s albums as Yesterday & Today, though everything I've ever read about them suggests I'd like them a lot -- thinking of them as somewhere in the neighborhood of late '70s Riot (which I've grown to think was amazing), maybe? Anyway, I got Y & T's In Rock We Trust from '84 for $1, and turns out I like it more than Martin Popoff (who gives it a 4 and basically calls it a scattershot AOR sellout, which is probably true) does. Apparently the semi-hit (which Popoff likes) was "Don't Stop Runnin'," but I hear three tracks more even brutal or anthemic or just plain entertaining than that: The title track, which is just a hilariously over-the-top Spinal Tap retard-metal power protest that's too dorky to resist ("Kings and queens and presidents are tryin' to take the world in hand/Jokers and freaks and Arab shieks are fightin' over chunks of sand...Tin soldiers march around the world no matter what the people say/One man makes the policy while the rest of us get blown away!); "Master and Slaves," likewise OTT in sound and with backup vocals answering "Master!" that I swear may have inspired "Master Of Puppets" from Metallica (who as I recall were fans); and "Lipstick and Leather," more S&M rock (a topic these guys seem obsessed with) but dancier, sounding like a heavier version of '80s Robert Palmer, which is to say pretty much exactly like the Electric Six sound nowadays. Otherwise, yeah, there are ballads and AOR schlock, but not much more than on say the Scorpions' Blackout (a Popoff 10) as far I can tell, plus Dave Meniketti sings more or less like Sammy Hagar and I don't mind it. Still don't doubt their earlier albums were a lot more rocking, and maybe if I'd heard all that stuff first I'd be pissed off by the dumb hackwork here too, but I didn't.

Deborah Frost, in Rolling Stone Review 1985, didn't like it either, fwiw: "Rarely have suggestions of Grand Funk Railroad (the lead vocals), est (lyrics), and It's a Beautiful Day (meandering solos) been combined so painfully." But she also calls the tempos funereal, which is just wrong; they're not exactly thrashing, but give or take the ballads they're not slow, either. So I don't think she listened close.

Jasper and Oliver btw say Yesterday and Today started out as a Top 40 cover band, which makes me curious about whether there are any tapes or bootlegs of evolving metal bands covering '70s Top 40 hits back then -- might be cool. Like, I'd love to hear Van Halen covering KC and the Sunshine Band, which they supposedly used to do before their debut.

Actually, what I called "the title track" is the lead track, called "Rock & Roll's Gonna Save The World." (And it does!)

so i was reading in gene simmons' autobio that HE was the first person to get van halen into a studio? brought them to new york to record and all that. i never knew that. cyrus - who is four - collects kiss books so i've been learning all kinds of fun facts. you know, his autobio isn't half as smarmy as you would think.

i never thought i would ever listen to this much kiss in my life. cuzza cyrus. i pretty much never listened to kiss until this year and last year.

oh and i don't think i've ever actually listened to an entire Y&T album.

The two albums as Yesterday & Today are good. The debut, which was on London, has the live evergreen, "Alcohol" -- alcohol, alcohol, tomorrow morning I'll be climbing the wall" and variations on such for the chorus inviting singalong. "Fast Ladies, Very Slow (sic) Gin," "Come On Over," "Animal Woman," "25 Hours a Day," "Game-Playing Woman," you get the idea. One track mind does what it knows in amiably loutish and leering way. Guaranteed to greatly offend almost all women including Deb Frost.

The second album, Struck Down, is not quite as solid. The two are unpretentious hard rock albums, in tone fairly well ahead of the time. Meniketti and the rhythm section are very heavy and in the pcoket for these records.

Earthshaker is their hardest, fastest and heaviest.

After trying the really hard and heavy rout, wrapped up after Black Tiger, Y&T softened the image, tried to look a bit like pretty boys and started writing for the stripper rock/hair metal audience.

"Lipstick and Leather" was a pretty good stab at that. Always like the tune but their highest successs came off "Summertime Girls" and the accompanying MTV video from Down for the Count, a silly album with a robot girl on the front cover 'going down' for the Count. I liked it but I don't think their hardcore fans did at all, including Popovic.

"Summertime Girls received tremendous airplay worldwide, played frequently in the Baywatch television series ..." sez Wiki. I kinda remember a Pam Anderson connection; now I perhaps know why.

Went to Geffen, did two albums really aping David Lee Roth-Van Halen, the most obvious being Contagious with a "Hot for Teacher"-type steal on it. Forget the name of the song.

I interviewed one of Y&T's ringer drummers after the original guy left many years ago because he was a Pennsy local. Had a little fun at the expense of the guy always changing his name.

It's here:

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2009/12/wayback-machine-goes-nightclubbing.html

Surprising how little Sia Michel brings to a feature on The Runaways movie for the New York Times.

Most of it devoted to movie trivia on production and the director who is the wife of someone from
The Living Things, the band taking her and Dakota Fanning on tour as research for the movie.

"Though 'The Runaways' follows the general trajectory of the band, Ms. Sigismondi also considers the movie more of a coming-of-age story than a definitive biopic, focusing on the relationship among Cherie, Joan and Kim Fowley, the band’s insult-spewing male manager (Michael Shannon). In the film Cherie struggles with her twin sister, a sick alcoholic father, addiction and instant notoriety ....

"The Runaways’ classic hit from their four-year career is the 1976 jailbait anthem Cherry Bomb;"

It was never a hit as far as The Runaways LP was concerned.

"The quintet’s combative sexuality — surprising for rock at the time — seemed to both alienate and titillate audiences. Though they were talented musicians who helped write their songs and were
ferocious live, they were often written off as a slutty, manufactured novelty act by the dude-dominated ’70s rock press and heckled by male musicians, even those they appeared with."

It would have been possible to reference YouTube video of the band, of which there is quite a bit.
I've always felt it often looks acutely embarrassing and awkward, mostly because of the corset
thing and limitation of what you actually can do onstage without the benefit of a big production logistical tail/caravan. Plus it was the Seventies.

"Ferocious live ..." Yes and no. The actual live album from Japan was stepped on in the studio. The boot of an Agora performance which was reviewed upstream shows them to be decently acceptable -- it's not a bad listen -- but really mediocre until warmed up, like many bands. And a number of the tunes,
just like many in Seventies hard rock band stage repertory, are just bad.

"(Creem magazine infamously dismissed them with three unprintable words.)"

What's so unprintable about "These bitches suck" ?

It was Rick Johnson. I couldn't scrape it up in Google Books but he also said:

"How do I hate The Runaways, let me count the ways."

And

"Their vocals recapitulate the history of minor mouth pain ..."

"After the actors were signed, rock school began. The women took lessons in their characters’ instruments so they knew how to hold and wield them correctly, and Ms. Fanning and Ms. Stewart trained to sing exactly like the women they were portraying ..."

Meanwhile Ms. Fanning got onstage with the Living Things to learn the ways of a rock goddess, from the force of her voice to Cherie’s microphone twirling strut. “I had never sung with a band before and felt the power of something like that behind me,” Ms. Fanning said.

"Ms. Currie hopes the film will bring a reconsideration of the Runaways’ legacy."

Joan does "Cherry Bomb" on Leno last Tuesday.

I enjoyed Y&T's Down for the Count and Contagious for what they were at the time, and probably like "Summertime Girls" as much as anything that actually has David Lee Roth (and more than anything that he did solo). Never heard anything after that, and had no idea they were still around!

everyone is still around. seemingly.

Xpost re Cherry Bomb do for Leno.

Sure greases the live version that she had on video on the movie website a couple weeks back. The sound on the rhythm guitar ---- owwwww.

Speaking of a thread over, the Macc Lads. I find I have their entire output. If you've heard it, you know. If not, difficult to briefly describe in the relentless delivery of filthy Ogden Nash-isms
on sex with loose ugly women, defecation, Chinese restaurant race baiting, power drinking, perversion and over-eating set to hard pop punk rock. Which would seem to cover everything worth covering that way.

The last album they made even has arena rock in the same vein. Nothing US is quite the same. The Mentors don't compare at all. And the English slang and Macclesfield accent is a bit hard to get through until you've listened to it a lot.

The Pork Dukes were kind a like 'em only not as prolific or hummable.

Now I'm listening to the totally awesome song, "Village Idiot," followed by the bracing "Frogbashing" for the promotion of vacation and soccer hooliganism into which they insert the French anthem into the chorus of "Frogbashing, frog bashing, dirty bastards" as well as ...

The dirty gits eat invertebrates, burn our sheep, they need a good thrashing,
You see, the fact is, we're out of practise, its been too long since we went frogbashing.

The tarts over there, they're covered in hair, it's hard to know just where the gash is,
All French lasses have got moustaches and serve your beer in tiny glasses.

C'mon, you know that took work. These are from Alehouse Rock which, in retrospect, kind of
outdoes The Anti-Nowhere League in a number of areas.

A song about Rottweiler dogs from the point of view of the dog, who insists that "I can tell you
that I love you when your nose is up my bottom."

Good song about premature ejaculation, sung by a girl, "Two Stroke Eddie."

Start: "Hey, is that Eddie's cum you're wearing?"
Girl 2: "Uh-huh."
Girl 1: "Gee, it must be great riding him."
Girl 2: "Uh-uh."

"He had a problem with his timing."

So she dumps him.

Listening to the new Scorpions album, Sting in the Tail, now. Nice use of 70s talk box on the first track, "Raised on Rock" (not a cover of the Elvis song). A few other decent rockers on it, but four ballads out of 11 tracks is at least two too many, and ending what's been rumored to be their final album with an ultra-cheesy power ballad called "The Best is Yet to Come" (you can just picture them exhorting a drunk, bored state fair crowd to sing along) sends the wrong message. Also, they seem overly concerned with rocking - "Raised on Rock," "Rock Zone," "Spirit of Rock." "Slave Me" is a pretty good cross between their early '80s work and recent Ted Nugent, though. At best, this album has five good songs, so I can't really recommend it.

heaven forbid that the scorpions should be overly concerned with rocking!

Well, they didn't used to be so clumsy about it. Like they're trying to convince themselves, not just the audience.

Sounds almost like an album I'd like because of a dumb try-to-hard earnestness they don't need to peddle. Anyway, Phil's line on drunk bored state fair crowd made me laugh. I covered that demographic for half a decade in Allentown. Fun times. You ain't lived until you've heard a band's lead singer (any band, for me it was Krokus) shout, "Hey Cleveland! How ya tonite! Yah!" At the Allentown Fair Ground. Or at your local ag fairground. In retrospect, it was probably an unintentional compliment.

Now I just gotta give a preliminary shout about Myonga's pre-stupendoug-fame Bob Seger anthology.

I'm late to the party on it.

However, as I told Myonga in e-mail, I wonder why he let the major label beat the Wilson Pickett/James Brown out of him. Rhetorical question, obviously.

"Sock it to Me Santa," aside from the seasonal lyrics, is very good and it struck me as almost exactly
the same thing the J Geils Band was doing on its first two albums, only with a better singer. Shows how
much Seger and the latter were influenced by the same urban black r&B style. And "Yellow Berets" had
me laughing as well as scratching my head, since Seger is 11 years older than I am and was far more
vulnerable to the draft. Tonkin was a year after he turned 18 and he was in the Last Heard, if Wiki's
bio is right, when the war really began to escalate.

"East Side Story" is the "Gloria" rip everyone has to play. It's one of the base codons of US rock.

"Persecution Smith" is -- anyway as I hear it -- a dig on Bob Dylan, hippies and protesters one read about in newspapers, given more jab by the Yardbirdsy backing. It also makes me thinks, if you put it ten years forward, as applying to Patti Smith, only for slightly different reason.

He also does ? & the Mysterians really good and a rich man's early Van Morrison.

If rock n roll spawns singers like him any more early on, they all sadly have to go to Nashville.

Who's singing with Seger on "Love the One You're With"?

Man, it just goes into this merciless vamp! If you're in a classic hard rock band, you gotta be able to play a section like that. Or you'll never amount to anything.

Interviewed John Bush of Armored Saint; results here.

Who's singing with Seger on "Love the One You're With"?

That's Crystal Jenkins and/or Pam Todd, who released an R&B record "Pam Todd & Love Exchange" in '77.

From LA Times:

The Runaways, the '70s all-girl rock band, is having a moment. With performances from Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, Floria Sigismondi's cinematic ode to the baby vixens of the Valley is based on Cherie Currie's memoir of the time, "Neon Angel," originally published in 1989 and out now with new material. The lead singer who immortalized "Cherry Bomb" will read and sign copies of her sassy tome

Sassy tome it wasn't. Had a review copy back when originally published. Was dire and fairly dreadfully written. Imagine a script for Foxes only not funny, no good moments and the girl doesn't die in
the end. I'd think it must have a substantial facelift.

Short Billboard Currie interview distributed through Reuters:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62C00020100313

I saw a preview screening of this. Pretty standard rock doc. Don't do drugs, don't trust sleazy producers. Some decent performances. Great songs, of course. Probably worse a Netflix.