Music

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The Listening Post: October 2010

California dreaming in the October chill.

  • Gene Clark—Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers. This 1967 effort can best be described as the best album the Byrds didn’t record. The former Byrds singer is in fine voice throughout, and Byrds/Beatles-style harmonies are provided by former Chris Hillman band mates the Gosdin Brothers, while the frequently sublime guitar playing is shared by all-stars like Clarence White and Doug Dillard. There are strong traces of pop, rock, and country on nearly every song, making this one of the earliest examples of country rock. Clark was a great songwriter (to my mind the Byrds never recorded a better song than Clark’s “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better”) and he had been the best singer in that band of great harmony vocalists. The highs here may not match the heights on the Byrds albums, but you can make a case that this is a more consistently good album than most of the efforts of his previous band, many of which featured at least one or two strong clunkers.
    Grade: B+
  • Teenage Head—The Flamin’ Groovies. The rumor/legend is that Mick Jagger claimed that Teenage Head was a better album than Sticky Fingers, and that the Groovies had done a better job of creating a modern blues/roots record than the Stones. I wouldn’t go that far, since I think Sticky Fingers is one of the greatest rock albums ever made. However, Teenage Head is a stellar effort, an intense blending of garage rock (“Have You Seen My Baby?”, “Teenage Head”), blues (“High Flyin’ Baby,” “32-20,” “City Lights”), rockabilly (“Evil Hearted Ada,” “Doctor Boogie”), and sublime pop (“Yesterday’s Numbers,” “Whiskey Woman”). “Evil Hearted Ada” crosses the line into pastiche, if not parody, but the rest of the album seamlessly skips between many of the elements that went into rock and roll in the first place. This is a brilliant album for the quality of performance and passion if not actual songwriting.
    Grade: A
  • Crown Of Creation—Jefferson Airplane. One of the lesser-known Great Moments In Psychedelic Rock comes at 1:50 into “Share A Little Joke.” In an otherwise unremarkable but good song, Marty Balin shouts “Hey!” as if he had suddenly been shoved off a cliff and Jorma Kaukonen follows with a guitar solo that puts the “surge” in Lysergic. That moment lifts the entire song. The Airplane’s fourth studio album, Crown Of Creation, is the bridge between the acid-tinged folk of their second and third, Surrealistic Pillow and After Bathing At Baxter’s, and the full-on acid rock of their fifth, Volunteers. The folk aspect of the original Airplane is here on tracks like “Lather” and “Triad” while other songs are a full-on sonic assault on the senses (“House On Pooneil Corner,” “Greasy Heart”). What makes the Airplane worth listening to long after psychedelic rock became a quaint memory is the arsenal they bring to the table. Marty Balin and Grace Slick are great singers apart (“If You Feel” is one of Balin’s best vocals ever); singing together they’re simply ferocious, leaving behind a scorched earth. Jorma’s guitar is synonymous with the guitar sound of psychedelia and acid-rock…go ahead and try to imagine what a psychedelic guitar solo sounds like and my guess is that it will sound a lot like the bent notes, sustain, and wah-wah that Jorma practically trademarks. Perhaps best of all is the mighty Jack Casady, whose rubbery, lyrical bass is prominent throughout this album. Casady is not given enough credit for his playing. He stands with John Entwistle as one of the great bassists of the rock era. Like most of their peers, the Airplane was subject to a fair amount of noodling (“Chushingura”), but their intensity and hard rock attack make them so much more interesting than bands like the Grateful Dead.
    Grade: A
  • Red Octopus—Jefferson Starship. And then there’s Jefferson Starship. Originally a joke name for a Paul Kantner solo album (1970’s Blows Against The Empire), Jefferson Starship became an actual band in the mid-70s. Gone from the Airplane was Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. But after making a guest appearance on their first album Dragon Fly, Marty Balin was back in the fold with Grace Slick and Paul Kantner for their second album Red Octopus. The heyday of psychedelia was long gone and the slick Seventies were well underway. Marty Balin contributed the lovely (if surprisingly raunchy) ballad “Miracles,” a song so good and so successful as a single that he spent the rest of his career trying to match it. “Miracles” is a breathtakingly pretty song, and Grace Slick’s “Play On Love” was another powerhouse single. Unfortunately, Jefferson Starship’s strong reputation as a 70s hit-making machine was forever destroyed by the horror of Mickey Thomas and the godawful dreck they released in the 1980s, including that terrible Song That Shall Not Be Named. But Red Octopus captures the band at their peak, before Balin succumbed completely to endless balladry. Both Balin and Slick sound as good as ever, and the songs are the best this association had done since Volunteers. There is some tough rock (“Fast Buck Freddie,” “Sweeter Than Honey,” “Play On Love,” “I Want To See Another World”), and gorgeous ballads (“Miracles,” “Al Garimasu,” “Tumblin'”). This a very 70s album, but an excellent one whose reputation has unfairly been harmed by what came later.
    Grade: B+
  • Los Angeles—X. I’m hesitant to call the début album by X a “punk” album which is how it’s generally classified. I have no hesitation in calling it a slam-bang rock ‘n’ roll album, however. Unlike many in the punk scene, X refused to disavow the bands that came before the Stooges and New York Dolls. Los Angeles is in some ways a blending of the two brightest musical stars in late-60s California rock. John Doe and Exene Cervenka use a vocal attack that is nearly identical to the aforementioned Marty Balin and Grace Slick while the lyrical view of the dark side of L.A. is cribbed straight from The Doors (Ray Manzarek produced the album and plays prominent keyboards on several songs). At the same time, guitarist Billy Zoom whips out revved up Chuck Berry licks to add an even older element to the music. For the sake of argument, let’s call it punk. If that’s the case, Los Angeles stands with the very best punk albums, from the Clash to the Ramones. X’s musical knowledge is deep, the lyrics excellent vignettes of a city lost in decadence. The album portrays the titular city as a desperate void where people are lost in isolation (“The Unheard Music,” “Your Phone’s Off The Hook, But You’re Not”) and look to fill the emptiness of their lives with sex (“Sex and Dying in High Society”), intoxicants (“Nausea”), and violence (“Johnny Hit And Run Paulene”). In the end, none of it matters and the only option is escape (“Los Angeles,” the souped-up cover of “Soul Kitchen”). This is a far bleaker vision of the City of Angels than anything even the Doors released, and makes the Eagles’ “Hotel California” sound like Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” But bleakness aside, what makes this album so good—and it’s a great album—are the tunes. Yes, the subject matter is coal-black, but the music—driving, propulsive, pounding—suggests a way out. Or at least a way to cope with the madness around you.
    Grade: A
  • Sailin’ Shoes—Little Feat. From the ashes of Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention came Little Feat, with Mothers guitarist/singer Lowell George and bassist Roy Estrada. There’s a quirky undercurrent to a lot of this that reflects their time spent with Zappa (“Tripe Face Boogie”???), but this is much more straightforward musically. The leadoff track “Easy To Slip” could have been, and should have been, a huge hit single, something Zappa could never do without the song being branded a novelty track. The eleven songs on Sailin’ Shoes are largely the template for what would be called the “California sound” in the 1970s. Everyone from Jackson Browne to Warren Zevon to Linda Ronstadt spent a lot of time absorbing the sound of this album, though only Zevon could rock as hard as this without sounding uncomfortable. The album is diverse, ranging from the lovely acoustic “Willin'” to the punishing rock of “Teenage Nervous Breakdown” with side trips to swampy blues (“A Apolitical Blues”) and white-boy pop funk (the excellent “Got No Shadow”). The real triumph of the album belongs to Lowell George, a brilliant singer and guitar player who brought a lot of heart and soul to this album, adding enough oddball quirks (like the piano-driven instrumental break in “Texas Rose Cafe”) to keep the music fresh, exciting, and interesting nearly forty years later.
    Grade: A

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The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Night

A Hard Day's Night

Having conquered the musical world with their singles, albums, tours, and cheeky grins, the Beatles turned their attention to the world of film. Their manager, Brian Epstein, had signed them to star in and provide the soundtrack for a new movie. The upstart Beatles, not willing to put their names and reputations behind anything they didn’t in some way control, chose Richard Lester as the director because they admired his short, surrealistic comedy films. The Beatles had seen the “rock and roll movies” that had been released and did not want to be associated with the kind of junk exploitation films that Elvis Presley was making.

Yet the Beatles were exploited when it came time to do the soundtrack. In America, the soundtrack album was released by United Artists and contained eight Beatles originals and a handful of instrumental tracks that were used as the soundtrack to the movie. Unfortunately, this meant that America was deprived of the best album of the early years of the Beatles.


U.S. EditionU.K. Edition
A Hard Day’s Night
Tell Me Why
I’ll Cry Instead
I Should Have Known Better (Instrumental)
I’m Happy Just To Dance With You
And I Love Her (Instrumental)
I Should Have Known Better
If I Fell
And I Love Her
Ringo’s Theme (This Boy) (Instrumental)
Can’t Buy Me Love
A Hard Day’s Night (Instrumental)		A Hard Day’s Night
I Should Have Known Better
If I Fell
I’m Happy Just To Dance With You
And I Love Her
Tell Me Why
Can’t Buy Me Love
Any Time At All*
I’ll Cry Instead
Things We Said Today*
When I Get Home*
You Can’t Do That**
I’ll Be Back***
*Released in America on the LP Something New
**Released in America on the LP The Beatles’ Second Album
***Released in America on the LP Beatles ’65

There’s no denying that even on the U.S. edition those original songs are top-notch, but the inclusion of what is, essentially, four doses of Grade Z Muzak is enough to kill any album. The U.K. edition of the album is nearly flawless, an all-original collection of thirteen sterling Lennon/McCartney songs. Ringo loses his turn at the spotlight, and George is given the lightweight but enjoyable “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You.” Otherwise, this album belongs to John and, to a lesser degree, Paul. It is the first Beatles masterpiece.

The single strange chord that starts the album kicks down the door in dramatic fashion and launches a song that nearly perfectly distills everything that was good about the early Beatles. It’s joyful, bouncy, full of exuberant harmonies, swapped lead vocals (Lennon on the verses, McCartney on the chorus), a crisp, exciting and very brief guitar solo, and Ringo hitting the percussion for all that he’s worth. There’s simply no way to listen to “A Hard Day’s Night” without feeling better. Even the ending, with the sudden introduction of a chiming guitar lick heard nowhere else in the song, shocks the listener. The Beatles had great songs before, but this was different, a huge evolutionary leap in songwriting and performing.

“I Should Have Known Better” once again features the harmonica that was so prevalent on the early Beatles singles like “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “From Me To You,” but here it was underpinned by a driving acoustic guitar with terse electric chords and lead lines weaving throughout, and Lennon’s masterful vocal riding the wave.

One of the things that makes Beatle albums so eminently listenable is that they contain a mix of slow, fast, and mid-tempo songs. “If I Fell” is one of the best of the early Beatles ballads, a song that is nearly breathtaking in it’s beauty. It’s also a sign of the rapid maturation of Lennon the songwriter. The man who just wanted to hold your hand a few months earlier now decries that naiveté, discovering that “love is more than just holding hands.” The vocal harmony of Lennon and McCartney is nothing less than astounding.

George Harrison gets his turn at the microphone on “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You.” It’s far and away Harrison’s best vocal performance to this point. He sounds confident and less like a Scouse teenager. The song, written by Lennon and McCartney, is a bit of a throwaway, but by this point even their throwaways were better than almost anything else being released. And whatever sins “Dance” has are more than forgiven by the Greek feel of McCartney’s gorgeous “And I Love Her,” a ballad for the ages.

“Tell Me Why” is another by-the-numbers rocker that is saved and raised to a level of greatness by Lennon’s lead vocal and the harmony vocals. A song that six months earlier probably would have been recorded very differently is now a textbook example of how to write a rocking pop song. The little guitar trills, the middle eight, the quick dash of falsetto vocal…all of these are elements the Beatles likely would not have used only a few months earlier, but their progress as songwriters was so swift that these songs almost sound as if they came from a different band than the one that recorded Please Please Me.

“Can’t Buy Me Love” steals from “She Loves You” the then-revolutionary trick of starting the song with the chorus and turns the trick into art. Has there ever been a song that reached out of the speakers and so hooked the listener with the opening line? Even “She Loves You” starts with Ringo’s brief drum roll, but “Can’t Buy Me Love” immediately immerses the listener in McCartney’s go-for-broke vocal. What often goes unnoticed is that it is the bass and drums that drive the song. True, there’s a hyperkinetic guitar solo and a steady acoustic-based rhythm, but the bass largely fills in for the lead guitar.

The second side of the LP has nothing as good as “A Hard Day’s Night,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her” or “Can’t Buy Me Love,” but it remains a classic album side nevertheless. Lennon solidifies his hold on the album as the lead vocal on five of the remaining six songs. This is a heavier slice of Beatle music than side one, containing no real ballads. This makes A Hard Day’s Night the hardest rocking album of the early period. In fact, while the Beatles would go on to record harder songs, this album may be the most consistently hard rocking of their career.

A Hard Day’s Night is Lennon’s triumph. It’s the album he had the largest impact on until the White Album in 1968. The whipping pace of side two, led by the one-two punch of “Any Time At All” and “I’ll Cry Instead,” the propulsive acoustic guitar workout “Things We Said Today” (one of McCartney’s best early tunes, featuring one of the best middle eights in Beatle history), and the closing triptych of “When I Get Home,” “You Can’t Do That” and “I’ll Be Back,” leaves the listener exhausted and breathless from the sheer exuberance of the Lads. While side two has no Beatles classics (from a popularity perspective, not a songwriting/performance perspective), it completes an album that surpassed With The Beatles to become the single best example of a rock and roll album to that point.

Grade: A+

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When You’re Strange: A (Bad) Film About The Doors

For over 30 years, I’ve been a fan of The Doors. I was knee-deep into the band when the book No One Here Gets Out Alive was released and by the time I’d turned the last page I was well over my head. For a teenager, the wild tales of Jim Morrison’s excesses were like nectar. Morrison wasn’t simply a drug addicted drunk like Janis Joplin, he was a poet, a shaman. Or as the beginning of that first bio put it, “Jim Morrison was a god. At least a lord.”

The book, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman, became the boilerplate for all future Doors releases. And that’s too bad because now that my teenage years are behind me, I think the book is junk.

The problem is not that the book has errors, but that No One Here Gets Out Alive encased Jim Morrison in a mythology that is, at best, half-true.

From every page of the book, you can hear the authors screaming “Look at the tormented genius!” One doesn’t get the impression that Morrison had a really serious drinking problem; instead Morrison is portrayed as a Dionysian shaman who tests the boundaries of existence through a derangement of the senses. Well, no. He was a drunk and a drug addict, but mainly a drunk. He wasn’t testing boundaries any more than the guy I see on Park Avenue in the morning, staggering down the street with his pants around his knees.

But the book was a moneymaker, and it brought a renewed interest in the band…an interest that greatly profited Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger, and John Densmore.

Since the publication of Alive, there have been a score of books about the Doors, a boxed-set of rarities, remixed reissues, officially released bootlegs, a full-length feature film, concert films, a VH1 Storytellers episode featuring the surviving members and a rotating gaggle of lead singers, and even a tour featuring Ray, Robbie, and Ian Astbury doing his best, most shameless, Morrison impersonation. Most recently there is a 90-minute documentary narrated by none other than Captain Jack Sparrow himself, Johnny Depp.

Some of this material has been great. I’m very partial to the “Doors Collection” DVD that compiles their videos, Hollywood Bowl performance, and their interview/performance at PBS, along with backstage film footage. I also thought Ray Manzarek’s book Light My Fire and John Densmore’s book Riders On The Storm were both excellent. Stephen Davis’s biography of Morrison, Life, Death, Legend is one of his better books.

But for the most part, the Doors remain trapped in the amber that is No One Here Gets Out Alive, and that’s a pity. Somewhere out there, right at this moment, Ray Manzarek is telling the story of meeting Jim on Venice Beach. He is using the words “Dionysos” and “shaman” without the slightest trace of irony. Rather than the story being a celebration of the Lizard King’s lyrics, vocals, humor, and life it is the story of one man’s descent into alcoholic hell. In recent years, Manzarek has been more forthrightly stating that Morrison had a real problem and that drunken Jim was not a pleasant guy to be around. But all too often he couches his criticism in that No One Here Gets Out Alive myth that Morrison was a dark god testing the boundaries of human experience in his endless quest to break on through to the other side.

Which brings me to When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors. Among Doors fans, there was a lot of hype around the Tom DiCillo-directed documentary since it promised lots of unseen footage and the cooperation of the surviving band members. It was all a sham.

The only remotely interesting thing about the documentary is the inclusion of clips from HWY, a short film made by (and starring) Jim Morrison. The footage from this film is pristine and oddly fascinating, but it in no way compensates for the fact that this is an otherwise dreadful documentary.

Clocking in at a paltry 86 minutes, the entire history of the band from formation to inglorious end is given less screen time than their incendiary first album gets in the Classic Albums: The Doors DVD (now, that’s worth watching). There are no interviews with anybody in the band or their extended entourage. Almost all the footage has appeared on other Doors-related DVDs and videos. Events are told out of sequence (the story of July 1969’s Soft Parade album is told before the story of the 1968 New Haven on-stage arrest and the March 1969 Miami incident). The narration by Johnny Depp is breathless and overheated, and the script he’s reading sounds like a first draft that was written in one weekend by someone whose only knowledge of the band came from a cursory reading of No One Here Gets Out Alive. Any Doors fan with a working knowledge of the band will be more than familiar with the story as it is presented here. Like their disappointing coffee table book The Doors By The Doors, this is Doors 101, an introductory class for a band that merits so much more. On the plus side, the footage of a hapless flight attendant asking the Doors if they’re a band “like the Monkees” is priceless.

One of these days, somebody will sit down with the surviving members of the Doors and force them to stop regurgitating the mythology. Yes, Jim Morrison was a drunk and a drug addict, but while he may have gone on stage three sheets to the wind, he wasn’t writing that way. Nobody writes good songs while inebriated. This is the Morrison I want to hear about: the poet, the songwriter, the music fan. I want to hear about the man, his sense of humor, his sober relationship with the other Doors. The Doors came out of an explosive era in rock music, but aside from their infatuation with Arthur Lee’s Love, the Doors seem to exist outside of the music scene. It’s almost impossible to get musicians to stop talking about music, but the Doors seem to talk about everything except music.

There’s a real human story behind this great band. It is not a tale of gods and lords, of shaman or Dionysian ecstasy. The story of the Doors is the story of four friends who were exceptionally good musicians, who wrote great songs, who rehearsed, who laughed together, who toured the world. Yes, the tales of drink and drugs, of arrests and outbursts of violence, are there, but these episodes of excess are not the whole tale, just part of the larger, human story. Hopefully there will be a documentary someday that will tell the whole story, not just the salacious parts.

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The Listening Post: September 2010

Autumn brings earth tones.

  • Mojo—Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. After a lot of time wandering in the wilderness in search of real inspiration, Tom Petty has come back with his strongest set of tunes since 1994’s Wildflowers. That’s not really saying much since this is only his fourth album in 16 years, but that doesn’t underestimate the strength of these albums. What’s interesting on Mojo is how Petty has reclaimed his muse by going back to his roots. There’s a strong bluesy feel to a lot of this, but the best tracks on the album are the ones that are the strangest in terms of Petty’s repertoire. “First Flash of Freedom” features an extended psychedelic instrumental section that sounds like the Doors jamming on an alternate take of “Light My Fire,” with Mike Campbell channeling Robbie Krieger. “The Trip To Pirate Cove” uses a ghostly backing vocal to augment a haunted tale. “No Reason To Cry” is a countrified ballad, and a beautiful one. “I Should Have Known It” is a bruising rocker. On the other hand, “Don’t Pull Me Over” simply proves that Petty should steer far away from reggae, “U.S. 41” and “Lover’s Touch” are strictly compose-by-numbers, and “Something Good Coming” is a decent ballad that never goes anywhere. Clocking in at over an hour, Mojo is about 15 minutes too long, but is still a worthy listen, thanks mainly to Mike Campbell’s excellent guitar throughout and the bar-band spirit that the Heartbreakers manage to inject into the songs.
    Grade: B+
  • Tons Of Sobs—Free. It is immediately apparent upon listening to Tons of Sobs that the début album by Free was logging a lot of time on Jimmy Page’s turntable in 1968. While most knowledgeable music fans know that Page borrowed an enormous amount of sound from Jeff Beck’s Truth, the debt that the mighty Zeppelin owe to Free is a less well-known story. After the Moody Blues-ish opener “Over the Green Hills, Part 1” Tons of Sobs explodes into a molten meltdown of British blooze, led by Paul Kossoff’s ferocious guitar playing and Paul Rodgers’s impassioned and soulful vocals. “Worry” features jagged, circular guitar lines that will shred your eardrums, and there’s a terrific version of Albert King’s “The Hunter.” While most of the songs suffer from the sameness of sound and performance that dogs a lot of the Brit blues albums of the late Sixties, there’s no denying that each track represents this mutant strain of heavy blues at a peak, and the album as a whole doesn’t have time to get boring since it begins and ends in less than 40 minutes. What this album represents is a template for what heavy rock would sound like in the 1970s. While other bands may have taken the sound further and done more with it, the debt that bands as diverse as Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Foghat owe to Free is enormous. And Free had a better lead singer than any of those bands, and a guitarist who could hold his own with any of his more famous peers.
    Grade: A-
  • Taj Mahal—Taj Mahal. L.A.’s Rising Sons were considered one of the can’t miss bands of the club circuit, gifted with the extraordinary guitarist Ry Cooder and, in band leader Taj Mahal, a vocalist with more grit and soul than any of his peers. Despite some fine recordings, however, The Rising Sons never hit. Ry Cooder went on to a semi-legendary career playing with nearly everyone under the sun, and Taj Mahal became the oddest of birds: a blues cult artist. Despite a great reputation with the critics, Taj never had mainstream success as a blues player because his music included everything from folk to world music. But in 1967, the début album was a straightforward collection of great blues tunes featuring sublime slide guitar from Taj, extraordinary lead guitar from Jesse Ed Davis, and the virtuoso Ry Cooder playing rhythm. Add in a rhythm section that practically defines the term “in the pocket,” cover it with the magnificently gruff vocals by Taj, and you’ve got one of the single best blues albums you’re ever likely to hear. There’s only one original song, “E Z Rider” but the covers are smartly chosen to highlight the band. Taj sets up Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues” and delivers a hit to the Allman Brothers who stole his arrangement. Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom” gets a passionate reading with stinging slide guitar worthy of Elmore James. “Leaving Trunk,” “Everybody Got To Change Sometime” and “Diving Duck Blues” are electrified translations of the acoustic country blues of Sleepy John Estes, and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Checking Up On My Baby” gets sped up and swings like a Louisville Slugger. At nearly nine minutes, “The Celebrated Walkin’ Blues” drags a bit, but only a bit, and that drag is a smallest of nits to pick on an otherwise extraordinary album.
    Grade: A

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The Listening Post: August 2010

The long, hot summer continues and I am escaping the swelter into the past of Mod/freakbeat-type stuff from a bygone era.

  • Friday On My Mind—The Easybeats. It’s hard to tell with a lot of the records from this era whether the album is a genuine artistic statement from the band, or if it’s just a cobbled together collection of singles. That’s especially true with non-American bands since the American record labels frequently released bastardized collections of songs as albums. Either way, Friday On My Mind from Australia’s Easybeats is a winner. For starters, it has the classic title track which remains the single best waiting-for-the-weekend song in rock music, a song of such effervescent joy that it would make even the sternest curmudgeon sing along. But then when you add “Do You Have A Soul?” “Saturday Night,” “You Me We Love,” “Pretty Girl,” “Happy Is The Man,” “Who’ll Be The One,” “Made My Bed, Gonna Lie In It” and “Remember Sam” you start talking about an album that stands alongside the best albums of its type. If the caliber of the songwriting isn’t quite up to Lennon/McCartney or Jagger/Richards levels, there’s still no question that the team of Harry Vanda and George Young (older brother of AC/DC’s Malcolm and Angus) are still first-rate tunesmiths. There’s also a punky cover of the perennial ’60s standard, “River Deep, Mountain High,” a by-the-numbers Mod raveup called “Women (Make You Feel Alright)” and a throwaway tip of the hat to nascent psychedelia (“See Line Woman”). Whether Friday On My Mind is an artistic statement from the band, or a make-a-buck package from an American record company is, in the end, irrelevant. It’s a fine album, and much of it brushes the edges of brilliance.
    Grade: A
  • Rolled Gold—The Action. The Action was a middling R&B band out of North London that had the distinction of being signed to EMI by George Martin, the producer for, and man who signed, the Beatles. They played around for a few years doing the usual Sixties covers like “Land of 1000 Dances” and songs by Goffin and King. In 1967 they went into the studio and recorded a series of demos that showed the influences of bands like the the Small Faces and the Who, as well as the growing psychedelic scene. The record company hated the demos and refused to release the album, and the band broke up. In 2002, Rolled Gold was released and it’s a gem. The obvious touchstone for the album is The Small Faces, but it would be unfair to imply that The Action is strictly a second-rate copy of that great band. These are startlingly good songs, beautifully played and sung. Only the slow, acoustic-based “Things You Cannot See” is of a less than extremely high quality, and it’s not bad at all. Of the rest, “Come Around,” “Something To Say,” “Brain,” “Look At The View,” “I’m A Stranger,” “Little Boy,” “Follow Me” and “In My Dream” are as good as anything that came out of the London Mod scene in 1967 (and yes, that includes the Small Faces and the Who). The remaining songs are nearly as good. How this album never saw the light of day in 1967 is a mystery. Had it been released it would today be considered a cult classic along the lines of S.F. Sorrow or Something Else By The Kinks.
    Grade: A
  • No Way Out…Plus—The Chocolate Watchband. Things really were different in the 1960s, and some bands just couldn’t get any respect. The Chocolate Watchband was a rough and tumble garage rock band who scored with the brutal “Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)?” a musical question that sounded like it was being posed by the Manson family, and not the Earth mothers who wore flowers in their hair. Once they went to the studio to record an album, however, the record label and their management started swapping out members and replacing them with session musicians. Even the lead singer was replaced for some songs. The end result of that is that this a band with no real identity since it’s nearly impossible to know who is playing what. Given that, this first album (in this expanded edition) is surprisingly good. The replacement players did their parts well, playing in the garage/punk style of the original band. There’s a fine, raw version of Buffalo Springfield’s “Hot Dusty Roads” and a somewhat psychedelicized take on Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” but the album is at its best on the punishing, fuzz-drenched rockers like “Love-In,” “Let’s Talk About Girls,” “Milk Cow Blues,” and “Sweet Young Thing.” The ballads “Misty Lane” and “She Weaves A Tender Trap” are also excellent and there’s a decent, but loose run-through of “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying.” Where the album falls apart are the faceless psychedelic instrumentals “Dark Side of the Mushroom,” and “Expo 2000,” and the dreadfully dull “Gossamer Wings.” No Way Out…Plus is a good collection with a few songs that should be pictured in the rock ‘n’ roll dictionary next to “garage rock.”
    Grade: B

  • Take A Vacation!—The Young Veins. The two main songwriters from emo-weenies Panic At The Disco apparently ran out of mascara, so they split up that band in order to go all the way back in time to the mid-sixties. Everything from the Beach Boys-style cover art to the mid-Sixties production of the music mark Take A Vacation as an album strangely out of time. That said, this is a good collection of catchy songs. It’s far from a grand artistic statement and as an album it doesn’t stand up to the best albums of the decade for which they pine. This is not even close to being a Beatles or Stones album, and it’s a several steps below the second tier of mid-Sixties bands like the Hollies. The Young Veins have to settle for releasing a uniformly pleasant batch of very catchy, finger-snapping, toe-tapping songs that are in one ear and out the other. Yes, it’s a good way to listen to tunes for 29 minutes, but why would I want to go back and listen to this when I can listen to The Hollies’ Greatest Hits?
    Grade: C+
  • Love & Desperation—Sweet Apple. For those about to rock, Sweet Apple salutes you. Sweet Apple is apparently an indie rock supergroup, though the only name I’m familiar with is Dinosaur Jr.’s guitar genius J Mascis, who plays the drums on this collection. The album was the result of a gathering of friends in an attempt to help one of them, band leader John Petkovic deal with his grief after the death of his mother. The end result is twelve tunes that rock in a style unheard in decades. It’s not that this is the heaviest or fastest thing you’ve ever heard, it’s that it echoes 1975 in a more seamless manner than the Young Veins’ mimicry of 1965. Forget the cover art that shamelessly steals from Roxy Music’s Country Life. There are no pretensions to Roxy-style art rock. This is also not the arena rock of Queen or Bad Company. Sweet Apple is the unrepentant outdoor summer festival rock of Grand Funk Railroad, minus the shirtless poetry of Mark Farner, the bong-rattling bass of Mel Schacher, and the competent drumming of Don Brewer. “Do You Remember” and “Somebody Else’s Problem” are great heavy rock, and “Blindfold” rides an asteroid-sized riff into your skull and climaxes with a corrosive guitar solo that will turn your brain to goo. Nothing else on the album rises quite to the level of these three songs, but all of the rest is pretty darn close. If you like your rock music heavy in that stadium boogie style, but played with an alt-rock edge, Sweet Apple hits the bulls-eye.
    Grade: B+