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X: Smoke & Fiction

smokeWhen X first came on the scene in 1980 they were hardscrabble punk poets who had the good fortune to be noticed by former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who was always a sucker for a band that wore their Doors influences on their sleeve. Those first four X albums (Los Angeles, Wild Gift, Under The Big Black Sun, and More Fun in the New World), all produced by Manzarek, still stand at the top of the Los Angeles punk scene from the late 1970s and 1980s. They were less aggressive than Black Flag, more tuneful than the Circle Jerks, less obnoxious than Fear, and, unlike the Germs, had written actual songs with melodies and choruses. Their combination of poetic lyrics, a punk rock rhythm section, and a Chuck Berry-loving rockabilly guitar player were unlike anything else on the scene. Their vocal harmonies were borrowed from Jefferson Airplane, their lyrical content from Jim Morrison. Though they came from the hardcore punk rock underground, that had more to do with their location than their actual sound. They were punk in attitude, but a rock and roll band in practice.

Unfortunately, X then signed to a major label and fell into the hands of less sympathetic producers than Manzarek. In the mid-80s all the rough edges were sanded down and X started to sound like every other band on the planet. Many of the songs were good, but the production was just awful and completely generic. Shortly after, guitarist Billy Zoom decided to retire from the music business. By the time the alternative rock explosion of the early 1990s was happening, they were barely performing or recording and they split.

It was a surprise when X announced a new album in 2020, and an absolute shock when Alphabetland was so good. The rough edges were back, the songwriting was as good as ever, Billy Zoom was back. In  30 minutes, X issued a defiant statement to the usual second-rate reunion album. While it may not quite measure up to X classics like Los Angeles or Under the Big Black Sun, it’s clearly a return to form for a mostly forgotten band.

Smoke & Fiction picks up where their previous release, Alphabetland, left off and proceeds to surpass that effort. This is X sounding as good as they ever did. I don’t know whether they had any “help” in the studio, but both John Doe and Exene Cervenka sound the same as they did in 1980, and Billy Zoom reels off one great guitar part after another.

From the opening whiplash riff and tight guitar solo of “Ruby Church” to the Chuck-Berry-on-speed recurring lick that marks the chorus transition of “Baby & All,” X races through one of the year’s best albums in less than 30 minutes. Along the way there are several self-referential lyrics that reflect on their career. 

“We were never just kids/We did what we did/To set each other free” they harmonize in “The Way It Is.” It could be about a relationship but easily doubles as a look back to the band that was featured in the 1981 Penelope Spheeris documentary about the L.A. punk scene The Decline of Western Civilization. In “Big Black X” they complete the circle to their first album with a reminiscence of their career (“Drivin’ state to altered state/Holdin’ foldin’ maps/On another pay phone break/A big black X on a white marquee”) and a love song to the city of Los Angeles 44 years ago, when the Hollywood sign was in disrepair and the Hillside Strangler was making his presence known. “We knew the gutter,” they sing, but “also the future.”

But it’s not all backwards-looking. On “Sweet Til The Bitter End,” the second track on the album but really the spiritual kickoff, they state “Let’s go around the bend/Get in trouble again/Make a commotion.” On the terrific title song, Exene sings of the fire that still burns inside her: “My soul still goes out walking/Over bridges that are burning/There’s lessons I keep learning/All the leaves are turning” before calling out faith in faithless times (“I still pray a little bit/But there’s no saint for this”).

Even the slower songs (“Face in the Moon,” “The Way It Is”) have power behind them. “Face in the Moon” rides a chugging riff as John Doe sings again about California, flying into Los Angeles from San Francisco and driving down the Hollywood freeway. It is, as always with X, an unflinching look at a California they love, but that they also feel is doomed: “From the freeway to the sky/You get your way with a thousand lies/An ugly life that seems so pretty/Stealing through this tin can city.”

Smoke & Fiction is, according to the band, their final effort. It’s as good a way to go out as any. X compromised their sound in the mid-80s under pressure from corporate suits but on their final two albums, released 27 and 31 years respectively after 1993’s Hey Zeus, they managed to do a nearly impossible feat: release new music that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with their music from nearly a half century ago, when they were young, talented, and burning with ambition. If you want to call them punk because they emerged from the same Los Angeles club scene that birthed hardcore, then they’re America’s greatest punk band. I prefer to think of them as just a rock and roll band with some punk rock nuance. Even with that broader classification they’re still one of America’s best bands.

Grade: A

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Jack White: No Name

Rock’s most notorious prankster has struck again. On July 19th (my birthday) anybody who bought a vinyl album at the Third Man store received a free gift with purchase: a vinyl record in a plain white sleeve, bearing the words “No Name” with song titles as “Side One, Track One”, “Side One, Track Two”, etc. There was no other information, but there was a picture of the record on Third Man’s Instagram page with the command to “rip it.” Copies of the album immediately began appearing on YouTube as the lucky owners realized that they were holding a brand new, unannounced, Jack White album. A week later the album appeared, with song titles and the official name of No Name, only on streaming services…quite a switch from the current king of vinyl who has a somewhat undeserved reputation as being a Luddite.

White’s recent solo releases have leaned towards heavier, bordering on industrial, music, as if you were hearing the White Stripes playing Nine Inch Nails. The creative misfire, 2018’s Boarding House Reach, was both the zenith of this style and the nadir of his career. Noisy, harsh, and largely tuneless, Reach set the tone for 2022’s Fear of the Dawn, which was just as noisy and harsh but had a few more tunes.

Dawn was the first half of a musical diptych, followed only a few months later by Entering Heaven Alive, a beautifully paced collection of acoustic-tinged ballads and mid-tempo songs that was White’s best album since the magnificent Blunderbuss, his initial foray into solo work. Now, two years later, comes No Name, an album that received no hype whatsoever. There was no marketing, and no physical release at all until earlier this month. There have been no videos. News of the album was strictly word of mouth. Many fans, not knowing what they had in their possession, probably assumed the album was a throwaway.

It wasn’t.

No Name eclipses Entering Heaven Alive as the best Jack White solo album since Blunderbuss. In many ways, it harkens back to the White Stripes of Elephant and Icky Thump. This is the most minimalist album White has done since the Stripes. Most songs feature just three musicians. Only one song (“That’s How I’m Feeling”) features a full band of guitar, bass, multiple drummers, and keyboards, but the stars of this show are White and his fellow Raconteur Patrick Keeler on drums. It’s also a family affair with White’s wife, Olivia Jean, playing bass on “Old Scratch Blues” and “That’s How I’m Feeling,” while his teenage daughter Scarlett adds the bottom end to the delightful “Archbishop Harold Holmes” and “Underground.” Perhaps best of all is “Number One With A Bullet” which features just White and Keeler in a tantalizing glimpse of what the White Stripes would have sounded like with a more conventional drummer.

The minimalism extends to the packaging, featuring the same blue-tinted image on both the front and the back cover, a simple black inner sleeve, and a white-on-black lyric sheet. The name of the artist and album appear only on the spine of the album.

This is the hardest rocking album in White’s career. There are no ballads to soften the blows that come fast and furious in the thirteen tracks. Even the songs that start gently explode into a fury before too long. Throughout the album the musicians are in overdrive, from the Stripes-ish mutant blues of “Bless Yourself” to the punky thrash of “Bombing Out” and “Missionary”, which cops the opening riff from the Clash’s “Clash City Rockers.”

White’s sense of humor is also present. “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking)” mourns the world we’re leaving behind for our furry brethren. “The world is worse than when we found it/It sure must be rough on rats…But I should stop complaining every time it’s raining/’Cause I’m still not food for cats.” Meanwhile, “Archbishop Harold Holmes” takes the form of a letter from the title parson who promises the answers to all life’s questions “If you’ve been crossed up by hoodoo, voodoo/The wizard or the lizard/You got family trouble?/Man trouble?/Woman trouble?” But the solution is a Ponzi scheme, the prosperity gospel that promises wealth if you first give all you’ve got: “By sundown, Monday/You who come will be blessed with the big money blessing/You will be doubted by all the unbelievers/On all the things I’m addressing/But you must tell seven friends/You must first bring seven friends.”

“What’s the rumpus?” White asks before harkening back to his younger days as a musician. “When will the label dump us?/They tried to stump us/What genre will they lump us?” It’s a sincere question coming from a musical iconoclast like Jack White. His music skips merrily from heavy rock to blues to rap to country to bluegrass…sometimes all in the same song (e.g., “Lazaretto”). He’s spent his entire career blurring distinctions between genres while still sounding like himself. From the cheap plastic guitars and red/white/black color scheme of the White Stripes to the suit-wearing, blue-haired troubadour of Entering Heaven Alive, White has remained his own man and has achieved great success by doing things his way. While No Name calls back to his earlier days in terms of sound and distortion, it’s very much the work of a mature artist who, after twenty-five years making music, still has a lot to offer and a lot to prove to himself.

Grade: A

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The Rolling Stones: Blue and Lonesome

Blue and LonesomeAs the Rolling Stones got older, long past the retirement age of mere mortals, and as Jagger’s salacious sex addict lyrics sounded sillier and sillier coming out of his wrinkled puss, fans such as myself began wishing that the Stones would show a little dignity in their old age and go back to their first love: blues. A solid blues album, maybe with a few acoustic blues numbers and a Chuck Berry cover or two, would be a great way for the band to come to the end of the line. Full circle, and all that cal. In 2016, the band delivered, though not quite in the hoped-for way. Rather than a bunch of Jagger/Richards originals, the blues album they delivered was all cover songs, mostly more obscure numbers. There would be no clichéd versions of “Got My Mojo Working” or “Smokestack Lightning” here. The Stones, befitting the blues aficionados they are, dug a little deeper. The only well-known song on here to the average rock music fan is “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” once covered by Led Zeppelin.

What’s particularly striking about Blue and Lonesome is how comfortable the band sounds. As on A Bigger Bang, the Stones are stripped down here, with only a little outside help on piano and keyboards, and a couple of stinging electric guitar leads from Eric Clapton. Mick Jagger doesn’t play any guitar on the album, for the first time in 30 years, concentrating instead on some of his best vocals in years and his magnificent harmonica playing. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood provide stellar backing throughout the album, drawing the blues around them like a comfortable old blanket. Charlie Watts is similarly clearly in his element here.

The songs are well-chosen, with covers ranging from Little Walter (“Blue and Lonesome”, “I Gotta Go” and “Hate To See You Go”) to Willie Dixon (“Just Like I Treat You” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby”). There is a certain sameness to the songs given that they are all traditional blues songs, the album was recorded in just three days, the instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, and harmonica) is the same throughout, and there are no original songs. However, at a brisk 42 minutes, the album doesn’t overstay its welcome as every Stones album since Steel Wheels has. This, plus the sequencing of the album alternating slow blues songs with faster jump blues, is the key to keeping Blue and Lonesome from becoming dull.

Of particular note on the album are the two songs featuring Eric Clapton. On Little Johnny Taylor’s “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” Clapton channels his fellow Domino, laying down some spectacular Duane Allman-ish slide and a solo that harkens back to his days as a Bluesbreaker. On “I Can’t Quit You Baby” he claws back Otis Rush’s original from the bombastic version that Led Zeppelin unleashed on an unsuspecting public. The version on Blue and Lonesome is true to the sound of the original, and Clapton’s solos stand in direct contrast to Jimmy Page’s. Clapton plays to the song here, and his solos are no less ferocious for it. Jagger whoops in appreciation in the background, sounding remarkably like a man half his age.

The blues was never that far away from The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World, but it’s a real treat hearing them fully embrace it in a way they haven’t since their earliest days as England’s newest hitmakers. The album does suffer a bit from a lack of original songs and a certain sameness of sound, but this is a pretty stellar late-career move from rock’s original bad boys.

Grade: B+

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The Beatles: Past Masters

Past Masters by the BeatlesIt’s almost impossible to believe, yet it remains true: You can compile a multi-disc Greatest Hits of the Beatles without including a single song from any of their albums. Such is the case with Past Masters, the collected singles, EPs, B-sides, and random tracks that never made it onto the band’s proper LPs. Most of the songs included did appear on the American versions of their albums, which cannibalized their singles to appear as hooks for the record buyer, but those LPs were creations of Capitol Records, not the band. The Beatles, and they were not the only act to have this opinion, believed that if you included singles on LPs you were ripping off the fans by getting them to buy the same music twice. It was really quite common in the mid-Sixties for an English band’s albums to be remarkably different than their American releases.

The Beatles, however, were a cut above. They were so prolific that they were churning out singles and EPs every couple of months, with a yearly (or sometimes twice yearly) LP release. Their musical output, driven by an insatiable demand, dwarfed the rest of the music scene by a large margin. Not only were they putting out a seemingly endless stream of new music, they were doing so at an astonishingly high level of quality. It was truly as if they didn’t want to be associated with anything mediocre or worse.

The singles, and the Past Masters collection, begins with “Love Me Do,” their moderately successful first single from 1962. Unbeknownst to most fans at the time, and even today, the single was a different version than the album track. The “Love Me Do” that appears on the Please Please Me album doesn’t feature Ringo Starr on drums. After the Pete Best debacle, George Martin brought in a professional studio drummer named Andy White to play instead of the unproven Ringo, who was relegated to tambourine. The version on Past Masters is the single version of the song, with Ringo on drums. It is, of course, a charming pop song circa the early Sixties (ironically, the pre-Beatles Sixties). There’s nothing much to the song except some nice harmonica and a good vocal hook. The lyrics are pretty bad, the instrumentation simple. There was no hint of what was to come.

From there Past Masters explodes with a dazzling string of singles from the effervescent “From Me to You” and “Thank You Girl” to the majestic “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” These last two songs, and their B-sides, “I’ll Get You” and the extraordinary harmonies of “This Boy,” are where the Beatle legend, and true Beatlemania, begins. “She Loves You” is the first Beatles track to use the trick of starting the song with the chorus, an instant ear worm that grabs the listener from the first seconds and demands full attention be paid. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” co-written by Lennon and McCartney in the basement of Paul’s girlfriend’s (Jane Asher) house was the shot heard around the world, especially in America where it soared to the top of the charts and took up residence there until it was replaced by an American reissue of “She Loves You.” Released in America just before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” caught fire in the weeks following that national tragedy. The timing couldn’t have been better. When America was reeling and mourning, a propulsive song filled with the joy and wonder of new romance exploded onto the airwaves. Thousands of people lined up at the newly rechristened John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to welcome the long-haired lads from Liverpool. America was the last great step for the Beatles to assume musical world dominance.

Those two singles are followed on Past Masters by “Komm Gibb Mir Deine Hand” and “Sie Liebt Dich,” which featured the band singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” in German, done to recognize their fans in Germany, the first country where the Beatles began to really make a name for themselves. It was released as a single in Germany.

In England, the band released an EP called Long Tall Sally. Since there was no market for EPs in America, these songs were processed as album tracks on a “new” unauthorized American-only album. Paul McCartney’s frenetic take on Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” plus covers of “Slow Down” and “Matchbox” and the sole Lennon-McCartney track, the excellent “I Call Your Name” comprised the EP.

The band closed out 1964 with one of their best early singles, “I Feel Fine” backed with “She’s A Woman.” Both songs are fine rockers, the former one of the first (if not the first) songs to feature guitar feedback on record. Before Jeff Beck’s “Shapes of Things,” before Pete Townshend’s “My Generation,” and long before Jimi Hendrix turned feedback into art, John Lennon’s song starts with a single guitar note followed by a blast of feedback. The song ends with dogs barking very faintly in the fade-out. “She’s A Woman” is Paul’s contribution, featuring one of his best early vocals.

“Bad Boy,” a racing cover of a Larry Williams song, was included on the American-only Beatles VI in early 1965. That’s correct. In the span of 1964 Capitol Records had milked the Beatles three official albums (With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, and Beatles for Sale), combined with the Long Tall Sally EP and the singles to release five albums in America. “Bad Boy” was really sort of the exception. It was released only in America until it turned up on a British greatest hits album (A Collection of Oldies But Goldies).

The first disc of Past Masters closes with two B-sides, the soaring “Yes It Is” which was the flip side of “Ticket To Ride” and the breakneck “plastic soul” of “I’m Down,” the flip of “Help!” “I’m Down” was never released on an album, even in England, and remained a lost track until it resurfaced in the 1970s on the Rock and Roll Music compilation. It remains a criminally unknown song, featuring one of Paul’s best vocals ever, wherein he beats his idol Little Richard at his own game.

The second disc of Past Masters also aligns neatly with the sudden maturity exhibited by the band. The early Beatles are now done and locked in the history books. Disc two begins with 1966’s “Day Tripper”/”We Can Work It Out” followed by one of the greatest singles of all time, “Paperback Writer”/”Rain”. While “We Can Work It Out” contained much of McCartney’s trademark sunny optimism, it’s tempered by Lennon’s bridge, which reminds the listener that “life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting”. But it’s “Day Tripper” that ushers in a newer, heavier sound. Featuring a riff that Jimi Hendrix loved, and a lyric that’s simultaneously about drugs (in this case, LSD) and a very, um, frustrating woman (“she’s a big teaser/she took me half the way there” isn’t particularly subtle innuendo). “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” upped the ante, with both sides of the single being blasts of loud guitars and even louder bass from McCartney, heavily influenced by Motown savant Funk Brother James Jamerson. The production on these two songs is absolutely pristine. Despite the wall-of-sound nature of the songs, every instrument can be heard as clearly as if the band was standing in the room with you. Paul’s bass on “Rain” is particularly prominent and particularly good. It’s one of the great bass guitar recordings in rock and likely the first where that rhythm instrument is so loud in the mix, almost assuming lead duties. “Rain” also gets the nod for having the first backwards vocals on a pop or rock record.

In 1967 the Beatles singles were added to the English Magical Mystery Tour EP to create the album of the same name. This was the last time Capitol Records would rearrange the band’s output to make a few extra bucks. Since then, the American album Magical Mystery Tour has become so loved it was made canon in 1987 with the arrival of the Beatles on CD. As a result of that move, Past Masters does not include what were originally released as singles only: “Strawberry Fields Forever”/”Penny Lane”, “All You Need Is Love”/”Baby You’re A Rich Man” and “Hello, Goodbye” the A-side of “I Am the Walrus.”

The collection picks up again in 1968 with “Lady Madonna”/”The Inner Light”. The A-side is a rollicking, piano-pounding, Fats Domino-inspired number. The latter is one of George’s India-influenced sitar songs. “The Inner Light” has never been released on a Beatles album with the exception of Rarities in 1980. It’s a (mercifully) brief song that at least includes a backing vocal from John and Paul, a rarity on George’s India songs.

As good as “Lady Madonna” was, it held no comparison to the genius run of singles the Beatles had released since “Day Tripper” that included “Strawberry Fields,” “Penny Lane” and “I Am the Walrus” among others. The band had an ace up their sleeve with the next single, a song written by Paul as consolation for John’s son, Julian, as his parents were getting divorced. “Hey Jude” ended up being the most successful single the Beatles ever released, but in some ways that’s surprising. At the time it was the longest song ever released as a single, beating Dylan’s trailblazing “Like A Rolling Stone” by a full minute. The Beatles felt confident releasing such a long song (over seven minutes) because they knew there was no way the radio wouldn’t play it. Another reason its hit status was surprising is that the last four minutes of the song are given over to a mostly wordless chorus comprised of the band singing “Na na na na na na na hey Jude” over and over again. Not exactly hit material, that. What saves the fadeout from being boring is McCartney’s howling vocal interjections done in his best Little Richard voice while the music, complete with a 36-piece orchestra, builds inexorably around him. That’s hit material.

In the late summer of 1968 “Hey Jude” was pouring out of radio stations and jukeboxes everywhere, slamming into the number one slot and staying there for several weeks. Equally outstanding was the B-side, “Revolution.” This was the first time the Beatles were explicitly political in a song at a time when the New Left was rising in both America and Britain, and calls for revolution were dominating in political songs. Of course, the Beatles did it differently by making “Revolution” a song that was directly opposed to the rhetoric coming out of organizations like the Black Panthers and bands like Jefferson Airplane. “But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out,” John sings over a wall of heavy, distorted guitars. Lennon did want it both ways, however. In both the video for the song and the slower, more acoustic version recorded for the White Album, he changes the lyric to “count me out…in.”

The band was fraying around the edges at this point in their career. In January of 1969, less than two months after the release of their 30-song self-titled opus, the band was back in the studio. Under enormous pressure to write and record a new album and then do a single live show, the fraying got worse. George Harrison even quit at one point (memorializing the moment in his diary by writing “left the Beatles.”) George was back a few days later, and the band continued. There were some great ideas for songs floating around, but they simply couldn’t seem to get it together to bring the ideas to their full potential. The exception was their next single, “Get Back”/”Don’t Let Me Down.” The latter song was brought to the sessions by John, a heart-rending plea from a very insecure man to his new lover. The A-side of the single was created completely in the studio. There is a part in Peter Jackson’s extraordinary documentary look at these session, Get Back, where McCartney is heard playing around on guitar. The chords he’s riffing on have no words attached and are sort of formless, but gradually they begin to take shape and McCartney begins extemporizing mostly nonsense lyrics. It’s a fascinating process watching the song “Get Back” being written right before your eyes. The single was released in April of 1969, after the Beatles had given up recording the album they’d started in January. The version of “Get Back” that appears on Past Masters is a completely different mix than the version that would eventually appear on the album Let It Be.

The next single reflected where the Beatles were at that moment. Released only one month after “Get Back”, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”/”Old Brown Shoe” features a Ringo-less band. Since Ringo was taking some time away to work on the Peter Sellers film “The Magic Christian,” George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe” was recorded with McCartney on drums. The real question is, “Who plays bass?” The song features a very McCartney-esque bass line but George always maintained that it was he who played the bass. My money’s on McCartney. The galloping bass line is too loud, too busy without being overwhelming. Harrison was a fine guitarist, but there’s nothing in his entire recorded output that suggests he could play the bass in a fashion even approximating his Beatle bandmate, one of the best bass players in the rock era. George sings and plays guitar and organ on the track, with John on piano.

Similarly, “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” was completed without the missing Ringo but also without George. Written and recorded in one day, this was the last Beatles song to be done exclusively for a single and features John on vocals and guitar and Paul on bass, drums, and vocals. The song is far from being a ballad. It’s a brisk rocker that tells the story of John and Yoko’s wedding and subsequent honeymoon with all of Lennon’s trademark wit and humor. Paul’s drumming is particularly good. As Beatle singles go, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”/”Old Brown Shoe” is one of their lesser efforts as enjoyable as it might be. It simply doesn’t stand up against any of the singles they’d released since “She Loves You” started their run of genius work. Still, it’s a fun couple of songs.

The next Beatles single was not actually released by the band. “Across the Universe” was a song John had given to the World Wildlife Fund for a charity album called No One’s Gonna Change My World. It’s largely a throwaway collection of songs featuring The Beatles, the Hollies, and assorted C-list and D-list acts, which makes “Across the Universe” shine even brighter. Marrying one of Lennon’s best ever lyrics to a gorgeous melody, and overdubbed with the sound of a flock of birds, this is a remarkably different, and better, song than the one that appears on the album Let It Be. The song was recorded in early 1968 and was originally considered to be the B-side to “Lady Madonna” but was shelved until Lennon gave it away.

The Beatles broke up in April of 1970, when a staggeringly passive-aggressive McCartney released a phony interview where he told the world that he didn’t see working with John ever again. One month prior, the Beatles sent their parting shot to the music world with the release of the single “Let It Be”/”You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” The A-side really requires no explanation. It’s a very different mix than the one that would show up two months later on the album of the same name. The overdubs are largely absent and the guitar solo is wildly different. The B-side, however, was…something else entirely. The basic track was originally recorded in 1967, and included The Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones playing a saxophone. Vocals were added in April of 1969. The entire song is an extended joke, with John and Paul using funny voices mostly repeating the titular phrase over disjointed music. It’s not something most Beatle fans listen to on repeat. It’s not even something that most Beatle fans have even heard. It is, however, a wonderfully idiosyncratic, humorous goof that reminds the listeners that the Beatles were, above all, fun.

From October 1962 to March 1970, just seven and a half years, the Beatles released a mind-blowing 33 songs that did not appear anywhere on their officially released albums. Compiled here on Past Masters they are an easy-to-follow roadmap for the astounding leaps in maturity, creativity, and musical genius the band displayed. It’s almost impossible to believe that the band that released “Love Me Do” was the same band that released “Strawberry Fields” just four and a half years later, and then “Hey Jude” just a year and a half after that. The musical growth of the Beatles was off-the-charts, and unmatched by any band before or since. The best example of this growth is heard here, in the singles collected on Past Masters.

Grade: A+

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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