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Buried Treasure: Spooky Tooth, Spooky Two

Spooky_Two_coverA simple drum beat opens the festivities here, accompanied by various grunts from the singer who’s warming up in the wings, before the incredibly loud, magisterial organ comes in. Spooky Tooth has arrived and, with them, the beginnings of the Progressive Rock movement that would flower in the following years.

Like pretty much every type of music, Progressive Rock has many fathers. The Moody Blues introduced spoken word poetry, themed albums, and flutes into the rock landscape. The Nice, featuring Keith Emerson who had done a spell in Spooky Tooth before they recorded their first album It’s All About, brought classical influences and loud organs into the mix and served as the embryonic version of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. But lost to the ages in this lineage is Spooky Tooth, a tight outfit featuring two keyboardists/singers that knew how to rattle walls with both their keyboards and their voices. Mike Harrison was a blues singer who took no prisoners, his powerful voice booming out like a less guttural version of Joe Cocker. His is the dominant vocal presence on the album, with Gary Wright (of “Dream Weaver” fame) joining in for impossibly high harmonies and the occasional lead.

“Evil Woman” is considered by many to be the album’s (and the band’s) defining moment and it’s safe to say that everything that made up Spooky Tooth is included in the song: gnarly guitars, loud keyboards, Harrison’s blues belting, Wright’s screaming falsetto. Their swapping of lines on “Evil Woman” is thrilling, though the song’s nearly nine minutes does get a bit wearing by the end. For me, the real gems on the album are the remaining tracks. While nothing says “Spooky Tooth” quite like “Evil Woman” does, the other tracks are even better.

“Waiting For the Wind” and “Feelin’ Bad” begin the proceedings with Harrison singing in his best bluesy voice and the choruses increasing in both volume and intensity. There really wasn’t another band who sounded quite like this in 1969, when Spooky Two was released. Keith Emerson’s Nice had a loud organ sound, but were far too wrapped up in their classical pretensions. Emerson played like Bach on speed; Spooky Tooth played like they were in the Cadet Chapel at West Point when God said “Let there be rock.”

Elsewhere, “Lost in My Dream” shows a psychedelic influence, “Hangman Hang My Shell On  A Tree” brings the album to a close with a lightly strummed guitar and heavy gospel vocal influences that build to a conclusion featuring the band playing and harmonizing as well as any of the other bands of their day. The album also features some guest appearances, though all are uncredited. Steve Winwood shows up on piano on “I’ve Got Enough Heartaches,” a plaintive gospel-tinged number. Joe Cocker lends his backing vocal to “Feelin’ Bad” and Dave Mason appears on the ballad “That Was Only Yesterday” playing his trusty guitar.

Perhaps the most interesting footnote to this album is the tough rocker “Better By You, Better Than Me” which caused an enormous controversy in the 1980s after the heavy metal band Judas Priest’s 1978 cover version got discovered by the Mothers of Prevention (as Frank Zappa dubbed them). The notorious trial that accused Priest of hiding in their music secret messages that led people to kill themselves, an absolutely ridiculous charge, was based on a cover of a Spooky Tooth song from this album. For the record, Judas Priest weren’t hiding backwards suicide exhortations in their music, and Spooky Tooth’s version of the song is better.

The band began to fracture after this album, though they hung on in name until the mid-1970s as a shell of what they were here. Guitarist Luther Grosvenor left to join Mott the Hoople and changed his name to Aerial Bender. Gary Wright became a session player who worked with George Harrison quite a bit and achieved massive success with “Dream Weaver.” Drummer Mike Kellie eventually signed up with the punk rock band The Only Ones, famous for their classic “Another Girl, Another Planet”. Bassist Greg Ridley joined Humble Pie.

Since Spooky Two was one of the forerunners of Progressive Rock, it also was not a victim to the excesses of that genre. Only one song here tops six minutes and the entire album is a tight, concise 37 minutes long. It would have been nice if Yes and ELP learned that lesson and remembered that they were writing songs, not symphonies. I’d like Prog Rock a lot more if they had.

Grade: A

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Alive, Again—Pearl Jam, Dark Matter

It’s easy to forget these days, 33 years after Ten introduced Pearl Jam to the world, just how much new music from them was anticipated. When their sophomore album, Vs., was released it broke all sales records for the first week of any release. But as with anything, familiarity breeds a certain level of contempt. Pearl Jam’s star is faded now, a totally expected reality in a day when rock music is all but dead and the band has assumed the status of “elder statesmen.” In an odd way, their current level of popularity is likely what the band hoped for before Ten was released, and what they wished for after that album turned them into multi-platinum, voice-of-a-generation, icons. The insane levels of fame the band achieved never sat well with the members, especially their guiding light Eddie Vedder, who would probably be just as happy selling albums out of the trunk of his car. They didn’t want to be bigger than the Beatles; they only wanted to be as big as Fugazi.

Pearl Jam’s reputation was carried on the back of their concert performances. They are one of the most exciting bands to ever take the stage. Their studio output, strikingly consistent, now sells a fraction of what those early albums sold and there’s no question the band has settled into their status as rock legends with nothing particularly new to say. Since 1998’s Yield, an album many (not me) consider to be their finest, they’ve released a string of good albums that would never, and could never, fire up a new audience like Ten, Vs., and Vitalogy did three decades ago. Binaural, Riot Act, the fun but lightweight Backspacer, the tepid and boring Lightning Bolt, and the experimental but uneven Gigaton all had their moments of greatness, but the band frequently sounded like they were going through the motions. Only on their criminally underappreciated eponymous 2006 album did the band show their old fire on any sort of consistent basis. The Pearl Jam album stands with their best work.

Now in 2024 comes another new album, Dark Matter. The album was hyped by the band with Vedder calling it “the best we’ve ever done” and guitar god Mike McCready extolling the virtues of the band’s new heavier (!) rock.

So is it the best, heaviest record they’ve ever done? Nope. Does that mean it’s not good? Also, nope. In fact, Dark Matter is the best album the band has put out since 2006, when the war in Iraq fired up Vedder’s righteous indignation and inspired some of the band’s most ferocious playing. The new album is far less political and more personal, though politics does enter the mix at times (fortunately not in the ham-fisted way it did on Gigaton).

Musically the stars of the show on this album are guitarist Mike McCready, whose revved-up solos are among the best he’s ever done, and drummer Matt Cameron. Apparently the guys in Pearl Jam pressured Cameron to really cut loose on this album, to play like he used to in Soundgarden, and the drummer responded. Dark Matter contains much of Cameron’s finest work, his best work with Pearl Jam, and is one of the great drum recordings of the rock era. He always tended to get a little lost in the shuffle of great drummers who came out of the alternative rock scene because Soundgarden was always something of a faceless band with the exception of Chris Cornell. Dark Matter is the definitive proof that Cameron is right up at the pinnacle of great drummers from Keith Moon and Ginger Baker to Dave Grohl and Jimmy Chamberlain. Throughout Dark Matter, Cameron swings like the great jazz drummers, plays fills like Ringo after a shot of speed, and pounds like Bonham. It’s never less than a thrilling performance.

From the outset, a pair of adrenalin-fueled propulsive rockers named “Scared of Fear” and “React, Respond” the mission statement of the album is evident. This is Pearl Jam as God intended them to be. The experimentation with different textures and rhythms from Gigaton is gone, and the band has clearly woken from the slumber in which they recorded Lightning Bolt. In their place is the fast-paced, stripped down sound of Vs., mixed with the adult songcraft of Yield. In short, Pearl Jam is still alive.

The intensity drops a few notches with “Wreckage”, which bears a passing resemblance to Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly” before picking up again with the title track. “Dark Matter” may not be the fastest or punkiest track on the album, but it is certainly the heaviest. Matt Cameron provides a rock-solid anchor mixed with ridiculously fast fills as Mike McCready and Stone Gossard play slab-of-granite riffs and Eddie Vedder summons all his considerable passion into the vocal.

Throughout the album Pearl Jam isn’t afraid to embrace the contradictions that made them such an exciting and intriguing band from the beginning. Whether it’s arena-ready mid-tempo rock (“Won’t Tell”), sped-up punk (“Running”), acoustic-based rock ballads (“Setting Sun”), Who-ish ravers (“Got To Give”), or catchy pop (“Something Special”), they deliver some of the best songs they’ve done in their lengthy career. Best of all is “Upper Hand,” a nearly six-minute track that begins like a U2 outtake from The Joshua Tree, settles in to a beautiful ballad that features Vedder’s best vocal on the album, and then inexorably builds until it explodes into a volcanic McCready guitar solo.

Producer (and credited co-songwriter) Andrew Watt is a Pearl Jam fan who seems to be specializing in giving a boost to rock bands that have been showing their age (he also produced the latest Rolling Stones album, Hackney Diamonds, their best in decades). The album was written and recorded in just three weeks which tells me the key to the success of Dark Matter is that Watt didn’t give the band time to overthink things, unlike the previous two albums. The result is a late-era Pearl Jam album that hangs comfortably with their 1990’s prime releases.

Grade: A

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Cinema Speculation, by Quentin Tarantino

Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Back in 1993, I rented the movie Reservoir Dogs from my local Blockbuster based on nothing more than the fact that it had a really good cast and I was going through something of a Harvey Keitel phase at the time. In my head now I can see Quentin Tarantino, the director of Reservoir Dogs, nodding his head briskly and winding himself up to tell me about all the movies he discovered the exact same way, by taking a chance on an unknown film with a favorite actor. I’d never heard of the director.

I also was struck by the title. What were “reservoir dogs”? It was an evocative title, but I couldn’t fathom what it was evoking. Now, having read Tarantino’s ode to genre movies, I understand. It means absolutely nothing. It was just a title that he thought sounded cool.

And that’s the thing with Tarantino. The movies he’s made all have one thing in common: the director thought they were cool. Cool plots, cool stars, cool camera tricks. Cool like Fonzie. Cool like Steve McQueen in Bullitt, the first film that Tarantino discusses in Cinema Speculation. This book is not any kind of history of cinema in the 1970s…that would be handled definitively by Peter Biskind in his massive tome Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. This book is the equivalent of one of Tarantino’s movies. The movies written about in its pages are ones that Tarantino would describe as “cool”.

Anyone who’s seen an interview with Tarantino knows what he’s like. He’s a hyped-up motormouth who can go on for hours, or maybe days, when it comes to discussing movies. With the possible exception of Martin Scorcese, he likely knows more about movies than anybody alive. But unlike so many of his fellow cinephiles, Tarantino doesn’t put on any airs. He likes what he likes, and doesn’t like the rest. He’s more in his element watching a movie like Humanoids From the Deep than he would be watching The 400 Blows or La Dolce Vita. He’s refreshingly unpretentious for a Hollywood doyen.

And that’s how the book reads. It reads at times more like a transcript of a monologue than something he’s carefully considered and written down. He fills the book with personal anecdotes about the movies he’s discussing, and goes off on tangents about other movies that are directly or indirectly related to the main topic of the chapter. It’s as if somebody turned on a tape recorder and asked, “So what are your impressions of Deliverance?” and then just let Tarantino joyfully and effortlessly spiel.

Tarantino has kept notes about every movie he’s ever seen, going back to when he was a child and his mother took him to some very adult films (e.g., M*A*S*H). He can thus recall not only when he saw the movies, but where, and with whom. In the book he writes about the “Movie Brats” like Scorcese, Spielberg, and DePalma…directors who grew up obsessed with the movies, and how they differed from their forerunners who looked at the movies as a job to be done on time and on budget. The earlier directors tried everything they could think of to get rid of solar lens flare in their outdoor scenes, and now J.J. Abrams, one of the more recent movie brats and something of a hack at it, is known for inserting lens flare into his movies. Why? Because he grew up watching the older movies and accepted it as an effect he thought was marvelous.

Tarantino largely ignores the tent pole movies of the 1970s. He skips The Sting, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars, although each of those movies gets a mention or two. He skips Viet Nam-centered movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now in favor of Rolling Thunder. He makes the case, convincingly, that the violence and mayhem of Rolling Thunder makes for a better movie about veterans coming home from the war than the maudlin and overly dramatic “serious” film, Coming Home. He writes glowingly about movies termed “Revengeamatics” like Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder, and Hardcore (which he tears to pieces for the second half of the movie). He doesn’t mention it, but I’ll go out on a limb and say he hated Best Picture Oscar winner Ordinary People…with good reason.

Rather than belabor the much-discussed and analyzed Rocky, he focuses on Sylvester Stallone’s long-forgotten directorial debut, Paradise Alley. It’s an odd choice, and Tarantino writes about the experience of seeing Rocky in the theater and the reaction of the audience, an experience that mirrors my own almost exactly. Instead of Brian DePalma’s masterworks Carrie or Dressed to Kill, he writes about the early effort Sisters, a pretty pedestrian thriller. Clint Eastwood gets the royal treatment with a chapter about Dirty Harry and another about Escape from Alcatraz.

Even The Funhouse, a pretty standard slasher movie from 1981, gets a chapter.

Mixed in with these film discussions are personal anecdotes of a lifetime spent watching movies, and one chapter that gives the book its title, wondering what Taxi Driver would have been like if Brian DePalma had directed it instead of Martin Scorcese. There’s also a somewhat out of place chapter about Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller that, I suspect, was included because he wanted to write a chapter about that particular movie brat without falling back on The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or What’s Up, Doc?

Throughout the book, Tarantino’s love for movies shines through on every page. It’s almost impossible not to ride the wave of his sheer enthusiasm. I read the ebook version and there are some formatting issues that may or may not be in the print edition. Names of characters, and anything between quotation marks are all italicized for some bizarre reason. Tarantino also has a tendency to be all over the place in his storytelling as talking about one movie will remind him of others that he feels the need to discuss, sometimes at length. This is where that feeling that the book is a transcript comes in. It’s fun, it’s interesting and at times fascinating, it’s opinionated, and you can get dizzy trying to keep up.

Quentin Tarantino, along with Christopher Nolan, is one of the most interesting writer/directors working today. He has said repeatedly that his next movie will be his last so he can focus on writing about the movies. As a fan of his work from Reservoir Dogs to Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and including everything in between, I would wish for both. Hanging up his director shoes is the equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis retiring from acting. It seems like a crime against cinema. But if the downside is more books like Cinema Speculation, that will at least be something to tide his fans over and keep his gonzo spirit alive.

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Buried Treasure: The Monkees, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.

Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones It’s an easy mistake to make, to judge The Monkees by their hit singles without ever diving any deeper. After all, it’s not like they were a real band driven to make artistic statements over the course of an LP. But easy or not, it’s a mistake. In fact, the Monkees albums are a virtual treasure trove of potential hits; with a band constructed to be a hit machine, virtually all of the songs that were given to them were viewed as potential singles, and the songs written by the band members were their attempts to break the stranglehold the producers held over their product.

It’s well known that the Monkees were not an organic musical entity. In the Monkees’ musical suicide note, the elegiac “Porpoise Song” by Carole King, Mickey Dolenz’s beautiful tenor describes the band as “a face/a voice/an overdub has no choice/and it cannot rejoice.” For their second album, the appropriately named More of the Monkees, the band was not even aware that the album had been released until they saw it in a record store. On their third album, Headquarters, the Monkees seized creative control. They chose the songs and they played all the instruments on the album. It was a very good album, with several songs written by various band members. From an instrumental perspective nobody will ever mistake it for a Mahavishnu Orchestra album, but the songs were well-served by their arrangements. The group was rightfully proud of the album which shot to number one for a week or so before the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and turned Headquarters into a footnote.

Wisely, the pre-Fab Four decided to split the difference with their next album. They played most of the typical rock instruments with the exception of bass and drums, but left the majority to studio musicians. They also relied on professional songwriters more than they had on the previous album. The result was their best, and only truly cohesive, album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. For thirteen songs (well, twelve songs and Peter’s plosive palaver “Peter Percival Patterson’s Pet Pig Porky”), the Monkees sing their usual assortment of love songs, but mixed in are odes to a traveling salesman who seems to be selling something quite illegal (“Salesman”), an oblique lyric about the Sunset Strip riots set to a way-ahead-of-its-time Moog synthesizer backing (“Daily Nightly”), and not one, but two(!) not-particularly-subtle songs about using and losing an underage groupie (“Cuddly Toy”, “Star Collector”).

Elsewhere on the album the songs range from Davy Jones’s “Hard to Believe,” a slice of Dionne Warwick-style pop, to “What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round?”, one of the earliest examples of what would later be known as country rock, to “She Hangs Out,” a tough mid-tempo rocker sung convincingly by Jones, to the soft-rock stylings of “Don’t Call On Me.” Of particular note are the Nesmith-sung “The Door Into Summer” and “Love Is Only Sleeping,” a vaguely psychedelic song that has aged extremely well, and “Words” which features an impassioned vocal from Dolenz and a driving bass line courtesy of the album’s producer Chip Douglas.

Mixed in with all this is the ultimate Monkees track, the withering look at suburbia’s status symbol culture, “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” Written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and sung beautifully by Mickey Dolenz (was there ever a more sheerly listenable singer?), this is the definitive Monkees song, an insanely catchy ear worm that casts a cynical eye on the band’s own audience.

The year 1967 was an incredible one for rock music, largely considered one of the best. The Beatles released their “Strawberry Fields Forever”/”Penny Lane” single along with Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. The Doors released their first two albums, and Jimi Hendrix changed the world for guitar players everywhere with Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love. Jefferson Airplane hit big with Surrealistic Pillow. Bob Dylan laid the cornerstone of Americana music with John Wesley Harding.

It would be silly to lump the Monkees in with the titans of the rock music world. Their two 1967 albums broke no new ground, and have been largely forgotten by all but the most dedicated fans. The casual listener is satisfied with a solid Greatest Hits album from the group. But that doesn’t mean the albums aren’t good, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd is the best they ever released. In a world of streaming music, where all of these albums still live and wait to be heard, the casual fan would be well-served to listen. The Monkees may have been a pre-fabricated group built for television, but they were gifted with gold in their song choices and in their voices. They were much more than the hit singles.

Grade: A-

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Here Comes Everybody: The Story of The Pogues, by James Fearnley

Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the PoguesDissolution never sounded better than The Pogues. It seems almost churlish to ask how good the band would have been if they had tempered their wildly self-destructive tendencies and concentrated on the music. In his new memoir, Pogues accordionist and multi-instrumentalist James Fearnley asks the question whether it was Shane MacGowan’s headlong pursuit of oblivion that made him such a great artist. He doesn’t answer because there is no answer. Shane MacGowan was who he was, and never changed. The fact that he made it to the age of 65 before succumbing to his lifestyle is testament to the man’s constitution.

Just as any biography of The Doors quickly becomes a book about Jim Morrison, there’s no getting around the fact that the story of the Pogues is the story of Shane. Even though Fearnley gives plenty of ink to the other band members, MacGowan is the North Star. Even the cover of the book features Shane standing at the forefront while the rest of the band is in the background with their faces turned away from the camera.

The story here starts with MacGowan’s and Fearnley’s pre-Pogues band, the tastefully named Nipple Erectors (or The Nips, for short). MacGowan had discovered punk rock in mid-1970s England, quickly becoming one of the main faces on the scene. You can see a young MacGowan in dozens of film clips and photographs documenting the rise of bands like the Sex Pistols. The Nips were a very generic pub rock band with punk aspirations. There was nothing particularly interesting about them, as can be heard in what few recordings there are. There was certainly no indication of what MacGowan and Fearnley would do next.

By synthesizing traditional Irish folk music with the intensity and drive of punk rock, MacGowan and Fearnley created something entirely new. It was a recipe that later bands like the Dropkick Murphys and Black 47 would take up, though none of those bands came close to the gorgeous lyricism of the Pogues. The later bands took the wrong lessons, substituting ham-fisted party anthems and rebel songs for the more literate poetry that the Pogues, at their best, provided.

Fearnley is an excellent writer. It’s clear that he had literary ambitions before music took him down a different path. He sometimes gets a little precious with the language (e.g., the weather isn’t mild, it’s “clement”), but he seems at times to be downplaying the role MacGowan has in the story. Every member of the band drinks an enormous amount, but the death spiral of MacGowan seems to come out of nowhere. He’s a heavy drinker one minute and completely out of control the next, as if there were no linear progression of his illness. The singer they fired in a Japanese hotel room while on tour seems to be a different animal than he had been up to that point. (His response to being fired: “What took you so long?”) There is some discussion about Shane’s degraded vocals as time went on, but the final album with Shane, Hell’s Ditch, is almost completely ignored as is the fact that the vocals on the album are slurred and sloppy. MacGowan’s strong, if not very pretty, tenor was gone by that time. Whether this was a conscious choice to downplay the band’s notoriety in place of the sublimity of the music is a question only Fearnley can answer, but the effect is somewhat jarring.

The Pogues were almost a living stereotype of an Irish band. Profane, hard-drinking, boisterous, but with the soul of poets and the blood of their ancestors coursing through their veins. They sang songs about drinking, and fighting, and of Ireland’s oppression by the English. Anyone who’s ever been to an Irish wake will recognize the setting of “The Body of An American”. They sang love songs that bordered on inexpressible beauty. It’s almost impossible to believe that lyrics for songs like “The Broad Majestic Shannon” or the simply beautiful “Lullaby of London” came out of a man who claimed to have not been completely sober since the age of fourteen. Impossible, at least, until you’re more familiar with some of the great Irish literature.

The Pogues continued after Shane was kicked out, including a stint with Clash frontman Joe Strummer leading the band, but it wasn’t the same and Fearnley skips that time entirely. This is really a memoir of his time with Shane, of the great music on Red Roses for Me, Rum Sodomy and the Lash, and If I Can Fall From Grace with God. It’s a sad story, as the final years of Shane’s life are. He died in 2023, after being confined to a wheelchair for eight years when a fall broke his pelvis. He was an unrepentant drunk right up until the end. But now that the drinks are gone what remains are the lyrics, and they are timeless…despite the profanity.

Fearnley’s book has its shortcomings, but it’s a great story told well. The Pogues story in all its rambunctious glory may be best told by someone not so heavily invested in the story. But until that book comes, this is a worthy addition to the bookshelf.