9 posts tagged “rock'n'roll”

I found a series of interviews with producers and engineers about the making of memorable (or remembered, at least) records.

So, on the Rolling Stones front, Chris Kimsey says that "Waiting on a Friend" and "Tops" were originally outtakes from Goat's Head Soup, and that "Worried About You" was an outtake from Black and Blue. That's strange, because "Worried About You" is vastly better than anything on B&B. Deja vu all over again! I wouldn't have thought either one of those, but he were there and I warn't. There's also a funny little Steve Marriott (Small Faces, Humble Pie) anecdote in that one, and a bunch of Mick'n'Keith stuff too.

Many other articles at the same source, though the fun bits are mixed in with a lot of technical detail: Do you really need to know exactly how many microphones, of what make and model, and where placed, they used on the drum kit for "September Gurls" or whatever? And even if you do, you won't any more when you find out they're usually Neumanns that cost more than your car. But there's also a lot of more anecdotal/human-interest kinda stuff, too, that would likely interest people who don't care about microphones.

Possibly of interest to what few readers I may have:

• Another Girl, Another Planet
• The Band
• The Staple Singers
• The Pretenders (Only version 2, sadly)
• New Order
• The Smiths

So, there you go, that ought to kill your afternoon.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre, wow, holy crap, they ain't half bad, eh? When they don't suck, I mean.

If you've seen Dig!, you've got your own ideas about these guys, but like, whatever, I mean, as long as Anton Newcombe's not actually kicking me in the head, I'll enjoy the records. And if I go to see them, I'll stand out of range. And quite frankly by the end of the movie I wanted to track down those smug creeps the Dandy Warhols and fucking kill them, so Newcombe ended up seeming really sympathetic by comparison, even when he was punching out his guitarist onstage.

So these are from, I don't know, somewhere in their vast pullulating catalog of strange and terrible sounds. Dunno the year. Both are on the retrospective comp Tepid Peppermint Wonderland, is where I got them from. Not the hip record to have, no doubt, but fuck off. Lots of MP3s on their website, by the way. Haven't gone through those yet.

UPDATE: Extra bonus critical praise! (from the last review on that ill-conceived page):

In an era of introspective, pasty PC alt-rockers who claim to despise their own fame, it's refreshing to see someone who just wants to snort cocaine off a hooker's ass and Rock Out for a change.

Never had much use for XTC as such; they tried way too hard. But when they relaxed and made music to listen to, they revealed an eerie and unexpected knack for writing songs that were good, not just good for you. Notionally incognito as paleopsychedelic throwbacks the Dukes of Stratosphear, they did an EP, 25 O'Clock (1985) and an album, Psonic Psunspot (1987). Both are pretty damn good, and you can get the pair on a cheap two-fer.

Right, Hello! Yeah, I never heard of 'em either before last month, but bear with me.

Ace Frehley from Kiss had a US solo hit (#13) with this thing in 1978, but these retards had a #9 in the UK (and #7 in Germany!) with it in 1975 (b/w "Little Miss Mystery"). Russ Ballard wrote it after he left Argent. Argent's big hit in the US (that I remember, anyway) was "Hold Your Head High", which Ballard didn't write. Cool song, though.

Hello got signed with the idea that they'd record Ballard's songs. They did that ("C'mon", "Ask Your Mama"), but they wrote songs of their own too ("Another School Day", "C'mon Get Together"). And they memorably covered the Exciters' "Tell Him", which hit #6 in the UK and stomped all over the Glitter Band's dickless version. Rock on! I figure they probably played their own instruments, because frankly the playing on their records is too consistently lousy to be explained otherwise.

They sucked, yet they ruled. You can call it crap if you like, but where I come from, we call that rock'n'roll.

Never heard of Mud, didya? Not if you're American, anyhow. In 1974 this single spent eleven weeks on the charts in the UK, four of those weeks at #1. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, men of many hits, wrote it. Never drew flies in the US. Mud had two other #1 hits: One of those moronic Christmas singles the Brits love so much, and a cover of Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy". They started out glam-with-Elvis-overtones, and wandered into more sort of pure Elvis-tribute territory later on. All their hits, large and small, were worth hearing. No, really! But the glam stuff was key. And what was glam anyway, after all, but camped up, futuristicated '50s rock'n'roll?

They weren't a real band, right, because they didn't write their own songs, and I wonder if they really quite played all of their own instruments, either. And they did retarded dance routines on TV, while miming very badly indeed. But listen to the song! Listen! It totally rules.

Another cover by some heavy songwriters. I think maybe I'll make that a theme, but sort of a, like, sporadic one: A theme only on the days when I'm doing that, but otherwise not.

Google tells me that Buck Owens recorded this on his Tall Dark Stranger album in 1969 (outta print, seemingly). He wrote it with somebody named "Price"; Ray Price, maybe? Dunno. Too lazy to find out.

The Velvet Crush aren't just power-popsters; they're country fans, too, and they usually toss in couple country songs on their albums. This is the standout track from their otherwise ill-conceived Heavy Changes (1998). That was the second and last one they did with Mitch Easter producing. I admire Easter somewhere on the slightly creepy side of idolatry, but on Heavy Changes, every track but this one screws the pooch. Worse, the lads wrote sub-par songs. So go buy their and Easter's masterwork, Teenage Symphonies to God, or basically just fuck off and listen to, you know, crap, or... whatever. Ass, that's it. Go listen to ass, if you don't buy that one.

But this one track, holy crap, holy crapping crapola, I really like this one. Never for a single instant have I regretted buying this album. Dig that Telecaster crackle in the leads. And it's funn-kaay. Heaven.

I'll admit to having a sick, atavistic fondness for the Rolling Stones in their four-on-the-floor/Sucking-in-the-Seventies mode: "Everything's Turning to Gold", "Miss You", all that crap. Here's another one from those miserable swine. This was released in 1984, as a B-side for the tedious "She Was Hot". I've heard that a lot of the Stones' "new" material at that point, and all of it that was any good, was trunk songs from the 1970s. When they ran out of those, it was over, even before Wyman left.

This is good stuff, right down in the pocket. I'd pay to listen to just the rhythm section on this one, mainly the drums. You're getting Charlie Watts here at a pitch of excellence you don't hear very often from pretty much anybody. If Mark Knopfler played drums, he'd be Charlie Watts. It moves real nice, the whole thing. Not a lot of bands age that well, as bands.

The Modern Lovers, 1973. "Aborted album sessions with John Cale", say the credits. Somebody says "Kim Fowley" here, and also maybe they were actually just demos instead. I've got it on Songs of Rememberance [sic], one of those things that's not really exactly a bootleg, maybe, but then again there's no information about the label (Punk Vault), and when you Google the label there's very little sign that it ever existed. These guys make New Rose look like a major conglomerate. But anyway there's a lot of stuff like this out there, and this is one of the better ones. Mostly unreleased studio material, great sound.

Filene's is a department store in a part of Boston called Downtown Crossing, on the fringe of the "lonely financial zone by the sea". Beverly's a suburban town north of Boston. They say it's not much to look at now, but maybe in 1973 it was something special. But hey, whatever Jonathan says is special, is special. You want special? You talk to Jonathan: "It's so good to see the stars/I thought we'd lost them/I love Boston".

The guy in the band photo second from right, between Brooks and Harrison, is the late Jon Felice, who played guitar with the Modern Lovers for a bit. I think he's actually anachronistic as far as this track goes, but he's in the picture they put on the album so I figured I'd play along.

I started worrying that nobody's reading this blog, but then I thought, would Jonathan care? Nope. Jonathan would not care.

Skip Spence played drums in the original Jefferson Airplane lineup. After they fired him, he played guitar and sang in Moby Grape. Things went along not un-swimmingly until the incident in the hotel with the fire axe. That was in New York, when the drugs really got a firm grip. Moby Grape were recording their second album, Wow. "Wow" is one word for it.

They put Spence away for six months in the criminal ward at Bellevue. When they let him out, Moby Grape didn't want him back (it was them he'd been after with the axe), but Columbia gave him an advance to make a solo album. He bought a motorcycle, rode it to Nashville, Tennessee, and wrote and recorded an album called Oar in six days. He played everything himself. Then he got back on the bike and rode off into the sunset. That was December, 1968. His next move was to live on the street for thirty years, and he capped that one by dying indigent.

Oar was a bit iffy in spots. Which spots? All of them. It's very... iffy. It's overrated, but not as overrated as you'd think, for a record a paranoid schizophrenic made by himself in a hurry. Much of it is eerie, compelling, and at times catchy.

I've never had much patience with people who think the world began in 1967, ended in 1969, and never extended much beyond the Bay Area. They're either incurably narcissistic, permanently infantile baby boomers, or the boomers' poor dumb clueless offspring they've browbeaten into worshipping them like they worship themselves. Dirty fucking hippies. We hates them! In truth, most of what happened there and then was just fashionable, self-indulgent crap. Not all, though.

Here's Skip in happier days with Moby Grape, and on one of the sadder but more coherent songs on Oar. It's not all gloomy. In the Moby Grape picture, Skip's the prognathous character on the far left. He was Canadian, by the way. Just as you suspected.

Yada yada, Sister Lovers, The Madcap Laughs, blah blah.

UPDATE

Here are "The Moby Grapes" [sic] on the Mike Douglas show with Spence still in the band. Truly horrendous sound, Spence's voice is nearly inaudible, really not worth watching. I offer it for whatever it's worth.