Goats Head Soup COC-59101
Released 1973
Dancing With Mr. D
100 Years Ago
Coming Down Again
Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)
Angie
Silver Train
Hide Your Love
Winter
Can You Hear The Music
Star Star
"After Exile, such a beautifully set up list of songs that all seemed to go together, it was difficult for us to get that tightness again. We hadn't been in the studio for a year. But we had some good ideas. "Coming Down Again", "Angie", "Starfucker", "Heartbreaker". I enjoyed making it. Our way of doing things changed while we were recording it, and slowly I became more and more Jamaican, to the point where I didn't leave.'" (Keith Richards, 2010)
Once upon a time, if you'da asked me to rate Goats Head Soup I'd have said it sucked. One of their worst. The beginning of the end. The only copy I ever owned was one i picked up for $1 at a garage sale. The inner sleeve had been lost, replaced with one from a Hot Tuna album. It was scratched. But it had a couple good songs I wanted for the post-Exile Stones comp which I've made and remade many times, always with different track listings.
Fast-forward to the 00's, and I'm now burning my Stones comp to CD, rather than cassette. So I get hold of the lesser albums from the library, rip them, and start building my comp from the tracks.
And here, in my late 30's, I discover that, while It's Only Rock and Roll and Black and Blue yield only some tracks (actually, most of Only is pretty good), I really wanted all of Goats Head. Even the duff tracks.
"Dancing With Mr. D" - much maligned, I dig it. Keef's guitar uncoiling the song like a snake (is it really any sillier than the Stones other horror-movie songs? I think not). The Stones were always assimilating whatever was going on in the musical world around them, inhaling it and exhaling it, Stones-ified. They've been doing it since the beginning, taking in The Beatles, Merseybeat, Dylan, Motown, Stax, psychedelia, the Velvets, The Band in the 60's. In the 70's (and since), they just kept it up. Goats Head is one big inhale/exhale. "Mr. D" is Alice Cooper country - but it's all Stones, down to the "Sympathy"-style whoops in the background and Mick's street violence lyrics. Hidin' in a corner in New York City/Lookin' down a .44 in West Virginny.
It's a slow album. Even the rockers are slow. "Dancing" is slinky, not manic. It gives way to "100 Years Ago", which illustrates another ish. It's a patchwork song. Part Band-ish, loping roots, then country lilt on the bridge ("call me ... lazybones"), then veering into a Billy Preston-led jam before falling back to earth. It's all longing and regret:
Now all my friends is wearing worried smiles, Living out a dream of what they was; Don't you think it's sometimes wise not to grow up?
Went out walkin' through the wood the other day; Can't you see the furrows in my forehead? What tender days, we had no secrets hid away
Good stuff, and easy to miss, buried in the murk and haze of the album's sound. Mick has rarely before or since sounded so vulnerable.
Then Keef answers him. "Coming Down Again", a lugubrious soul ballad, sung by Mr. No-Sleep, with some gentle backing vocals from Mick ("sky fallin' down"). More regrets. "Slipped my tongue in someone else's pie; Tasting better ev'ry time;He turned green and tried to make me cry; Being hungry, it ain't no crime." Was this the story of the Brian-Anita-Keef triangle?
Things pick up speed. "Heartbreaker" kicks in with crashing electric piano chords and "Bitch" style horns. More violence, drugs, New York streets. Another .44. Mick in social protest mode - which isn't his strongest. But the music kicks hard - its the one Stones classic on the record.
"Angie" - the big hit and the big ballad. Ack! I used to hate this one, too. Despite Mick's affected vocal, now I find it affecting. The air of regret and sadness continues. The strings work.
Side Two is where things start to break down. "Silver Train", a loping blues-rocker about a prostitute, with shining Mick Taylor slide. "Train" seems to be a minor fave of Stones fans (frequently covered), maybe cause its the closest to Stones 101 this album gets.
What's left is one minor classic, two basically filler jams (with interesting qualities), and one Chuck Berry-style rocker that many adore. The jams are "Hide Your Love", a loping Jimmy Reed on quaaludes blues that sounds fine but never goes anywhere, and the more intriguing "Can You Hear The Music", an odd bit of ethno-musical wandering, shimmering Latin/African/who knows flashing around - the whole track seems to emerge from a strange, drug-fueled haze. Or enter one. It doesn't go anywhere, either, but its a fun trip. The rocker is "Star Star" aka "Starfucker". This one's much loved by Stonesophiles, mainly cause Mick says "fucker" repeatedly on the chorus. Me, I've always gone for "honey I miss your two-tone kisses, legs wrapped around me tight/If I ever get back to Fun City girl, gonna make you scream all night". It also has some of the dirtiest lyrics in the whole Stones catalog (which is saying a LOT!). But it's no masterpiece.
In between all this, comes "Winter". And that's not a masterpiece, either. But its close. Very much in the "Moonlight Mile" mode (my favorite Stones ballad). Strummed open chords. It's sure, been a long, long winter. And Mick rolls out his tale of longing and loneliness (on an album loaded with regret and remorse).
And I wish I'd been out in California
When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out
But I been burnin' my bell, book and candle
And the restoration plays have all gone 'round
Goats Head may be the least of the Jimmy Miller-era (i.e. the Golden Age) of Stones albums. It may be lacking in top-of-the-line material. But its a statement of how strong the band was at that moment that an album of lesser material resonates as powerfully as this. I keep coming back to it, again and again. That's a sign.
Boomtown A&M SP-5134
Released 1986
Welcome To The Boomtown
Swallowed By The Cracks
Ain't So Easy
Being Alone Together
A Rock For The Forgotten
River's Gonna Rise
Swimming In The Ocean
All Alone In The Big City
Heroes
"We didn't play a single show until after the record came out, ... I still don't know what happened. I was in a lot of trouble with a lot of different things and I was engaged in this 'young guy catharsis' thing. It was a couple of screw-ups in someone's bedroom with a portastudio, that's all it was. And talk about an unlikely duo, I was wrestling with paranoia and depression, and he was essentially agoraphobic. One day I was looking at 15 years in prison and he was a set painter at a movie studio, and the next we're being asked our opinion on world events. Both of us were freaked. It was like 'What happened?'". (David Baerwald, 2002)
For me it all started with this girl.
See, I met her at the barn we had down here in the 80's called One Step Beyond. It was too big and had lousy sound but I saw a lot of great bands there. And one night I met this girl. I was 20 years old.
So I got her number and we spent a week playing phone tag (we didn't call it phone tag back then. And there were no cell phones or e-mail). Finally when we did manage to catch each other, she told me she was going to see David+David at One Step Beyond next week, and did I wanna hook up. So I said yes.
Gulping, because I hated that damn "Boomtown" song that was always playing on the radio in the stockroom where I worked. I was not impressed with David+David, but I was very impressed with her. So I made my way down there and hung out with the throng outside the completely sold-out show until some girl sold me a ticket for $12 or something. And I got in and found her, and I got to see David+David.
***
If I was gonna describe the music on Boomtown, well, think 80's. I mean, 80's all the way. So 80's it oughta come packaged in a pair of parachute pants, with a picture of Ronald Reagan embossed on the disc. It's a time capsule straight from it's era. More dated, sound-wise, than probably anything else on this blog. Buried in sythesizers. Layers of jacked-up guitar. Mechanical-sounding drums (even with a live drummer). It's perilously close to - well, no, actually it is, what a friend once referred to as "El Lay Barf Music." And I hate El Lay Barf Music. And I hate 80's production and synths and layers of guitars. But Boomtown, well, there's always an exception. It has something else.
In part I know it's because, underneath all the glitz and glamour of the production are songs that bite hard and deep.
Ms. Cristina drives a 944
Satisfaction oozes from her pores
She keeps rings on her fingers
Marble on her floor, cocaine on her dresser
Bars on her doors, she keeps her back against the wall
The songs roll out a cast of characters - Handsome Kevin, who deals dope out Denny's, listening to the ground. The anger-management challenged singer of "Ain't So Easy", who cajoles his lover back after punching her with promises of future happiness, all deeply felt and insincere ("I'm sorry about your eye, I'll find a way to make amends" he says). The ships-in-the-night lovers of "Being Alone Together" - which does not refer to having private time as a couple. The mysterious lynch mob in the vaguely gospel-ish "River's Gonna Rise" ("God ain't in his heaven, something ain't right/I hear church bells ringing in the middle of the night/They're dragging a man by his insides/Through the broad daylight). The adventurer of "Heroes" ("Past the battered old bodies of dead, dead dreamers/Past the tethered and fettered"), the bartender pouring drinks for lonely drunks in "A Rock For The Forgotten", Steve, Eileen, and the unnamed dancer of "Swallowed By The Cracks" ("Me, I became this drunken old whore"). If these lyrics and characters and themes sound awfully close to Velvets territory, its because they are.
Which brings us back to the music. And this is the puzzle. Because normally I would, should, and want to, hate any record that sounds like this - "the upscale mixes and faux-soul exaggerations of generic AOR are such a turnoff that I wouldn't have played this twice ..." as Christgau accurately put it. But he did. And so did I. Eventually I wound up buying a copy. Then it went in the Great Record Purge. I never wanted to hear such a thing again. And I didn't even think about it again for probably a decade. And then I did. And I wanted to hear it. Hey, guess what? As a former Top Forty hit it's in still in print - in a budget-price edition, too!
The thing is, normally, an album with songs like this, I would regret that it didn't sound the way it should sound. That the songs weren't something more stripped-down, hardier, edgier sounding - music that backs the lyrics all the way. Sometimes, I do, almost, feel that.
But then I do, and I realize that's the key to Boomtown. The sparkly 80's music fits. Maybe it doesn't back the lyrics all the way, but it sounds right, in a way that a Velvety drone or Stoogey rampage or even sparse acoustic just wouldn't. Boomtown sounds like its supposed to sound.
***
Now, a great way to end it would be to say what a great show D&D put on, and what a magic night it was and how I married the girl.
Nah. We went out a few more times and then went our separate ways. As for David and David - well, they played the whole album - I don't know if it was in order or not, nor do I recall if they played any unreleased stuff. They did one encore - a rather pointless cover of "My Generation" - a choice I found very odd - which The Who - even the fagged-out Who of 1987, would have no need to worry about. And then they were gone.
And then they were gone. David and David never made another album. Boomtown is their statement. And it's a good one.
Raw Power Columbia 32111
Released 1973, reissued 1997
Search and Destroy
Gimme Danger
Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell
Penetration
Raw Power
I Need Somebody
Shake Appeal
Death Trip
My insanity bar was raised so high at that point that nothing sounded bent enough - ever. (Iggy)
I already talked about how, at 17, I was going against the grain of every putz at my high school, and blowing my allowance money on albums that were generally regarded as being good or important by the rock crit canon of the time (I had The Rolling Stone Record Guide, Christgau's book, and a few dozen others as road maps). This sometimes (increasingly) meant I was buying albums no one else at my h.s. (certainly not the meat-headed generation of Sammy Hagar fans I matriculated with) had ever heard of. What's more, most of them didn't want to hear them, or of them, anyway.
Which is how I came to pick up Raw Power, some time late in `83 (I think). (As I recall, I bought The Live Kinks and the first Pretenders album, and possibly Mott that day as well. If I did, I must've had some bucks on me).
Anyway, so I brought home Raw Power. And I stared at the cover for several days (as I recall, I listened to only one album per day, by choice. I wanted to savor them). I looked at its ghoulish-looking cover photo of Iggy, leaning on the microphone, and the back cover, of him scowling with his cheetah jacket, glaring in the mirror, or, bleached-blonde hair and lipstick, grimacing at the camera while (Scott Asheton?) stood in the background, holding a bass, looking on warily.
This album made me nervous.
I knew little about Iggy. I'd first heard of him in a little paperback bio of Alice Cooper (which I still have) which described him as some kind of raving madman. I'd once seen him do "Dog Food" on Tom Snyder and watched his bizarre, hyper behavior with Snyder - at the time, he just seemed like kind of an uneducated, deranged clod (I wasn't paying enough attention - you can see the interview here and see how wrong I was on all counts). All I knew about Iggy was that he was a hard-rocking madman who dwelt as far on the fringe as you could go (so I though, ha ha ha). And as I looked at Raw Power, I seriously wondered if I was going to get anything but a bunch of lunatic caterwauling.
But one day I came home from school, got up the nerve, drew the curtains (I liked - and still do, actually - to dance around the room when I listen to a record I dig, and I didn't care to have the neighbors watch me) and there, in my dim little teenage bedroom, I lowered needle to groove and got my first taste of The Stooges.
And I needn't have worried. Cuz by the time "Search and Destroy" was over I knew I liked them, and by the time the album was over, I knew it was a great one.
The music came crashing, ripping out of those cheap Sylvania speakers. Iggy yowled like a cat in heat. "I am the world's forgotten boy -" I had heard such adolescent angst before, sure, but never delivered with such fury, such defiance. Iggy sounded like he knew how much "they" (the straights of society, all those who didn't understand) loathed him - and he was determined to lash out, to do them harm, to make them afraid. Searching and destroying ... I will hurt you, I will show you fear, those who mock me.
The threat only continued on track two, with its gorgeous little arpeggio (how sophisticated for a band as brutal as this one). "Gimme danger, little stranger...." Doors-like crooning. This Iggy guy could really sing! What's more, he wrote fine lyrics, too - "there's nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories .... kiss me like the ocean breeze..." This was clearly not the work of an uneducated clod. "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell" was like the Stones cranked up to 12, all lust and and rage, while "Penetration" sounded like a nasty S&M masturbation fantasy (what did he want to be penetrated with, exactly?), wherein Iggy shrieked and mewled like an animal in agony (or ecstasy?). This was clearly beyond any hard rock I'd ever heard. Side two kicked off with a belch! That was something new! And then the band slammed into jumpy, nervous rhythm of the title track, the piano pounding away as the Ig exhorts us listeners "if you're alone and you got the shakes, so have I baby and I got what it takes". The psycho blues of "I Need Somebody" remains my favorite track to this day. Over a slow, ominous stomp (Dave Marsh once described it as sounding like Howlin' Wolf beating Mick Jagger to death with a stack of Yma Sumac albums - which doesn't remotely describe the track but is a great image anyway), Iggy extols his loneliness his need ... but as Marsh (again) suggested ... it sounds less like a paean to loneliness ... Iggy isn't saying "I need somebody, too" but "I need somebody to _________________" ... do something so unspeakable he can't even bring himself to say it. "Shake Appeal" rattles like a crazed punk rockabilly, Iggy howling at the moon, with a dick turning into a tree.
Then there's another set of slashing chords. But this time it's different. The sound is harsher, meaner. Williamson sounds like he's playing his guitar with shards of broken glass, slicing and dicing the chords cruelly into slashes of sound. The sound is atonal, harsh, clattering. The great albums tell stories. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. This is where it ends, The Stooges are saying, where all the sex and the sleaze and the madness will take you. Iggy is snarling. "Sick boy, sick boy ... I will steer you wrong"... the music continues to slash away, relentless, "I'll rip you, you rip me".. Iggy is shrieking "TURN ME TURN ME LOOSE ON YOU!!!" He sounds like the madman I took him to be. "Honey we're going down in history". Even as I first hear it, I knew this had been the band's final album. Hearing "Death Trip", it was obvious they knew it, too. "Death Trip" is goodbye. It's the sound of a car going over a cliff. But the Ig is taking you with him.
All I knew is ... after this, I could never listen to Sammy Hagar again...
(PS - there is one thing I disliked, though, about Raw Power - the sound. It sounded shrill, tinny, like a transistor radio turned up way too loud. I am an enthusiastic supporter of Iggy's remix, and am baffled that anyone could prefer Bowie's original disaster mix)
1969: The Velvet Underground Live Mercury SRM-2-7504
Recorded 1969 Released 1974
Waiting For My Man
Lisa Says
What Goes On
Sweet Jane
We're Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together
Femme Fatale
New Age
Rock And Roll
Beginning To See The Light
Ocean
Pale Blue Eyes
Heroin
Some Kinda Love
Over You
Sweet Bonnie Brown/It's Just Too Much
White Light/White Heat
I'll Be Your Mirror
...captures neatly the often-overlooked ability of the group to rock out gracefully without compromising its music or attitudes (Billy Altman)
At 17, I was haunted by the Velvet Underground.
It's a long story. Less than a year prior was when I started reading a lot of rock writing; because I was becoming a rock geek. And it was hard to hear much outside of the usual AOR crap on the radio back then (okay, still is, I suppose). And I was becoming aware of a whole world of rock and roll that I wasn't hearing. And a name that kept coming up was The Velvet Underground. And I read Ellen Willis' essay on them in Stranded, and somehow I just yearned to hear them (because the best rock writing makes us want to go out and listen to the music). But all I knew of them was that they were from New York in the 60's, and Lou Reed had gotten his start with them. And all I knew of him was that he did "Walk On The Wild Side", which was an okay song, but not a fave. Oh and I once saw him on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and found him pretty boring.
But I was haunted by The Velvet Underground.
And I took to staring at their albums in stores (when they had them) and wondering intently what they really sounded like, and trying to imagine what they really sounded like. And I just had to know.
So on a summer day, the first Saturday after school left out - the 11th grade over at last! - I took my little saved-up allowance and rode the bus to Palo Alto, a town some 10 or so miles from mine, to little hole-in-the-wall Recycled Records, and I spent my hard-earned $7 and change on the big green double album with the sleazy cover. And I took it home. And, trepidatiously, I put it on.
Don't you hate it when someone gives you some bullshit line about how a record "changed their life"? I mean, ferchrissake, you must not have had much of a life.
I guess I didn't. I mean, I was just a 17-year-old misfit no-hoper. And the record changed my life.
To a 17-year-old kid whose concept of a rock concert was some big arena event with lasers and video and sound blasting into the stratosphere, the sound of a band playing in a tiny bar (which is pretty much what The End Of Cole Avenue and The Matrix were, I believe) was something truly new. And to 17 year-old still making the run from bombastic 80's arena rock and only just discovering burning 80's hardcore teen angst, the sound of a band playing intimate, serious, lyrical, and incredibly mature (for rock and roll, but really by any standard) songs about adult subject matter (and I don't just mean the sex-and-drugs shock - all of the Velvets songs were far more adult than adolescent in tone) was more than an eye-opener - it was a total mind-fuck.
I was shocked by this album as I was shocked by every Velvets album I ever heard, each in a different way. What shocked me about 1969 was that it was a glimpse of a whole rock and roll world I knew nothing of - never even imagined; that it opened possibilities in the music and lyrics I'd never dreamed of. But what shocked me most of all, I think, was that I loved it. Instantly. As I recall, I knew within a few bars of "Waiting For My Man" that I was onto something. That this group was not overrated. That this was real. Real like nothing I'd ever heard before. 1969 became the soundtrack to the summer of 1983 for me (it would be a couple months before I'd pick up the Banana album - and even that didn't entirely displace it, though it was an a-bomb to the brain just as much as 1969, if not more). It got to the point where I was actually forbidding myself to listen to it, for fear of over-familiarity ruining it for me.
"Good evening," says Lou Reed, his voice gentle and soft. This was the creepy, leather-clad dude from those solo albums I so often stared at (when I got tired of staring at Velvets albums)? He sounds pretty normal. "We're the Velvet Undrground." And after some idle chit-chat about football, they dig into a loping, grooving version of "Waiting For My Man". As Altman says, it loses none of its power for being taken at a walk, not a run. "Lisa Says", all longing and lonely, giving way to barbershop/doo wop interlude before slamming back in to a final chorus. Then "What Goes On", with its demonic organ courtesy of the ever-underrated Doug Yule. The hypnotic groove they did so well. "Sweet Jane" - the slow version, heavenly wine and roses. "Real Good Time Together" - what a funny song for a band with such a forbidding image. It used to surprise me that I would put it on to hear that song - but I did. "Femme Fatale" - a foreboding bit of garage rock and roll (one of the few times they did sound like a normal rock and roll band - I mean that as a compliment), snotty Stones attitude - "see the way she walks, hear the way she talks ... she's just a little tease". And then the very strange "New Age", a song that mystified me then and still does now. Lou's best singing, perhaps ever. "Over the bridge we go"... I always used to imagine a couple walking through some elegant park at night, walking across a curved bridge over a small river or stream, lit by moonlight and streetlamps. Very romantic and evocative. I just liked the way he sings about making it with Frank and Nancy (a reference which went over my head at the time). "Rock and Roll", her life was saved by - Moe's cymbals and cowbell crashing and ringing away. "Beginning To See The Light", the record REM spent their career trying to make.
Side Three was the long side. "Ocean", pure head music, flowing over you - the music and the rhythm of both song and lyrics suggestive of gentle waves. "Pale Blue Eyes", Lou's greatest love song, and the infamous "Heroin". Stripped of Cale's viola and the feedback shriek, the song depends on itself and Lou's intense delivery for its power. On the surface the performance may be more sedate - emotionally its just as/even more powerful. Sterling Morrison and Clinton Heylin have complained that 1969 is too sedate, that it's not representative of the band. I call BS. One of the greatest things about the Velvets is that underneath the atomic-age roar of "Sister Ray" is the gentle folkie doo-wop of "I'll Be Your Mirror". One of the other greatest things about the Velvets is that under the gentle folkie doo-wop of "I'll Be Your Mirror"is the atomic-age roar of "Sister Ray". Side Four was always the odd side - a little more doo-wop and straight rock and roll ("Over You", "Sweet Bonnie Brown"), a sweet take on "Mirror" with (my brother) Doug on vocals, an extra-slinky, tough "Some Kinda Love", and 8.5 minutes of "White Light/White Heat", the set's one balls-out rocker. All groove and drive, Sterl and Lou trading white-hot licks, until the finale, where Lou calls out "higher", and they bludgeon the tune to death. The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" was a big record for me a year or so before this one. "Won't Get Fooled" is all build-up - after the first time you mostly listen for the climax - Moon's turns across the toms, Roger's scream - "White Light/White Heat" (which clocks in at the same time as "Won't Get Fooled") is almost the same deal - you listen for the climax.
They say you never forget your first love, right? 1969 was my first Velvets album and therefore my first favorite Velvets album. As their studio albums made their way into my collection it would be edged aside. I haven't listened to it that often in the last ... god, twenty-plus years (interestingly, the Velvets album I listen to the most anymore is Loaded). But anytime I do I still find myself thinking "damn! this is good!"
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs Atco SD-2-704
Released 1970
I Looked Away
Bell Bottom Blues
Keep On Growing
Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out
I Am Yours
Anyday
Key To The Highway
Tell The Truth
Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?
Have You Ever Loved A Woman
Little Wing
It's Too Late
Layla
Thorn Tree In The Garden
“I’d heard the tapes of Music From Big Pink by The Band and I thought, this is what I want to play not extended solos and maestro bullshit but just good funky songs.” (Eric Clapton)
Can we get the usual crap out of the way?
I've heard Layla discussed in one of three ways, ever: in terms of Clapton's love life; his shared heroin addiction with Duane Allman; and of course, guitar heroics. Great albums are not about the personal lives or failures of the artists - not really. And if all Layla had going for it was shit-hot guitar playing (which it admittedly has in spades), its legend would be barely earned. Layla has much more going for it than hot licks.
The funny and fascinating thing about it is, Layla is cut from a very similar cloth as Clapton's later solo albums. In a way. I mean, its a gumbo of blues, soul, mid-tempo rock. Not much different from from what he would pursue throughout the 70's until his conversion to an MOR rocker in the Reagan years.
Except, Layla is entirely different. And the key is not so much in the band's hot chops, but in the pure firepower they bring to every moment. Only five of the songs are even remotely fast, and those are basically uptempo shuffles. A couple of ballads, a couple extended (very) slow blues workouts, and a few midtempo shuffles. That's it. In the wrong hands, this could have been an exercise in 70's mellow blech-rock. It was in the right hands.
Because Clapton/Whitlock/Gordon/Radle attack the music with the same kind of fervor as any punk band. On the fast ones, you can hear them racing, falling over each other, sounding like they're teetering on the edge of chaos, but never falling over. On the slow ones, you can hear them burn. That same intensity, directed into a slow rumble, guitars aching. And Allman? He sails and sings with the strings over it all, a bird in flight.- you can hear the last notes of his song as the title track fades. Meanwhile, Clapton sings like a madman. Never a distinctive or particularly strong vocalist, he makes up for it by just plain cutting loose. This is as much a singer's album as a guitar hero's. He pushes the limits of his range, then past it, wailing "I'm such a loooooooooooooonely man," begging, voices stretched and pushed again and again - "I don't wanna faaaaade away", 'believe in meeeee, like I believe in yoooooo", the frantic whooping over the last verses of "Layla." Clapton and Whitlock's voices mesh, clash, veer off, come back, wrestle with one another, egg each other on. It's a Big Pink style approach (see quote above), but backed by harder hitting music than the former Hawks would care to muster.
The music is marked by a uncontrollable joy - even on the slowest, saddest songs you can hear the band just plain getting off on the music, each other, their shared creation. Layla wasn't cut live in the studio - but it sounds like it. The songs themselves are plainspoken. Simple lyrics, sparse imagery. Nothing flashy. Declarations of love, desire, longing. One aspect of its greatness is that Layla, stripped of pretensions, gets better with age. The simple beauty and truth of it rings much louder when you, the listener, know the joys of love, the pain of loss. To gladly crawl across the floor for her. To get down on your knees. To see her smile, any day.
Poor Clapton. He never let himself get this close to the edge again. Perhaps it scared him, what he saw there. Perhaps it was just too painful. He settled for pleasant rather than risk transcendent. The loss was ours, and his.
Talk Is Cheap Virgin 209 265-630
Released 1988
Big Enough
Take It So Hard
Struggle
I Could Have Stood You Up
Make No Mistake
You Don't Move Me
How I Wish
Rockawhile
Whip It Up
Locked Away
It Means A Lot
Richards's first solo album is a masterpiece of underachievement. He does nothing more or less than what he's always done on Stones records, slicing and dicing classic blues and Berryesque motifs into junkyard-dog guitar growls, singing in a shaky tortured-tonsil yelp that makes Jagger sound like Metropolitan Opera material. Half of the songs are really just licks and skeletal chord changes cribbed from the Rolling Stones' riff manual and jammed into sing-along shape... Admittedly short on ambition, the album – written and produced by Richards and drummer Steve Jordan – is deliciously long on grooves like the lazily swinging Rockawhile and the overtly Stonesy Whip It Up... A little ambition would have gone a long way, though... (David Fricke, Rolling Stone)
Time changes everything, don't it? It's 2013, and Talk Is Cheap is twenty-five years old.
Put it in perspective. 25 years before Talk Is Cheap, 1963: early that year, Charlie and Bill joined the Stones. By the end of the year they had released their first two, nearly-forgotten (and forgettable) singles. Perspective.
What did Talk Is Cheap bode? A revitalized Stones? A new, post-Stones career for Keith that would eclipse ol' Mick artistically and commercially?
In the end, what was it? "An all-too-simple pleasure, great grooves in search of a vital purpose," Rolling Stone called it, "loosely arranged, casually executed and at times downright sloppy [it] wouldn't even pass muster as a demo." Admit it - you were hoping for Exile On Main Street - Part Two. You know you were.
Keef solo turned out to be a footnote. I have good memories of his two tour stops in the Bay Area in `88 and `92. But it's been 21 years since we've heard from the Winos (perspective: in 1992 Sticky Fingers was 21 year old).
But the cool thing is that, 25 years on, Talk Is Cheap still sounds pretty good. And, despite, or perhaps because of, its bare-bones simplicity and minimal songwriting, its more consistent as an album than anything his main career band has done around it or for many years prior. I was listening to it at the office yesterday. I ended up slapping it into the car CD player for the ride home. Whomping funk bass that kicks off "Big Enough." The bump`n'grind, slashed chords of "Take It So Hard,"the relentless drive of "Struggle," "Could Have Stood You Up"'s joyful boogie-woogie swagger, "Make No Mistake"'s Al Green choked horns, the Willie Mitchell groove, the way Sarah Dash's smooth, sultry voice blends with Keef's ragged, cracked croak ("your lips ... melting into mine..." the Stones were/are often dirty, but it took Keef to come up with real adult eros) (throughout the album, he eschews Mick's usual adolescent horn-dogginess for more mature shades of lust and longing), "You Don't Move Me" ominous, relentless hypnotic acoustic guitar strum as he shames his enemy (Mick or whoever it may be): "you better kill the light/you're giving us all a fright". The lyrics are all dashed-off catchphrases, simple rhymes hung on the riffs like clothes to dry. The words become beats, licks. "How I Wish" is rock-solid Cali pop/rock. "Locked Away" a fine Cajun-spiced ballad. It all comes down with "It Means A Lot", all grind and rattling, broken-bottle chords, rumbling along with that air of finality that all good album-closers have.
Listening to it today, I find Talk Is Cheap a first-rate album of rootsy, groove-oriented music, made by a master; the best aspects of it come off as almost effortless - its the sound of guys who knew exactly what they want to do, and exactly how to do it. It's dark, sexy, you can dance to it, good driving or fucking music. Not too shabby for a footnote.
Fifth Dimension (Columbia CS 9349)
Released 1966
5 D (Fifth Dimension)
Wild Mountain Thyme
Mr. Spaceman
I See You
What's Happening?!?!
I Come And Stand At Every Door
Eight Miles High
Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go)
Captain Soul
John Riley
2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)
When I met Lou Reed in 1969, the only guitarist he would say anything positive about was McGuinn. When "Eight Miles High" had just come out he saw them in a club in the Village. He was thinking along the same lines too. He was listening to Ornette Coleman (Robert Quine)
It's funny, people think this one's a letdown.
Maybe because it breaks the mold of albums one and two so radically. There's a not a Dylan song in sight. And the folk numbers have a certain perfunctory quality to them. Well, some do.
It has been said that FD is the sound of The Byrds, stranded by the departure of main songsmith Gene Clark, short on material and filling the spaces with whatever they could come up with. I say they're wrong. Wrong, do you hear?!
Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn! were at times lovely little gems, Beatle-ized sixties folk, heavy on the Dylan, given full breadth by Roger McGuinn's surprising guitar. Fifth Dimension, on the other hand, shows The Byrds simply blowing their "folk rock" limitations right out of the galaxy. It is McGuinn unleashed. In the end, it's a total mindfuck of a record.
It starts off Byrdsy enough. A swaying, sea-chantey melody and a wistful vocal. But listen: McGuinn sings not of social injustice or love lost and found, or even Biblical musings or mystical street musicians. "Oh how is it that I could come out to here," he asks, "and be still floating?" It's a somewhat odd way to kick off an album. But this was the beginning of the age of the album as album, and it is perfect. "All my two dimensional boundaries were gone I had lost to them badly" McGuinn tells us, as he elucidates his journey to the center of the mind. It sets the theme, the tone and the story to come. It articulates what I just said above. McGuinn's been someplace exciting since we last spoke. He wants to tell us about it. He wants to take us there. And we will ride the music.
"Wild Mountain Thyme", then, is closer to familiar territory, a trad arr learnt off the Clancy Brothers, et al, and given Byrds treatment. But it is tossed off with an easy mastery, the same kind of mastery The Beatles, Byrds role models, had shown in their 65-era recordings. It is not a throwaway. In fact, its one of their finest moments; the strings melding with the guitars into a symphonic wave that pulls the whole song to its climax. For my money it may be their most fully-realized expression of space age folk music. "Mr. Spaceman," a light-hearted romp, McGuinn's stab at SETI. Heard today, it makes me think of the opening scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wonder if Speilberg is a Byrds fan?
"Spaceman" serves as a nice bridge to the brain-melt that follows. "I See You" is amateurish free-association lyrics (so what?) over thrilling jazz-rock chords. There's a lot of that going around 65/66. The Byrds have it down, but this is only a sketch. "What's Happening?!?!" takes it even farther, parsing jazz moves with sinuous raga-rock, McGuinn playing straight from the opium den. "I Come And Stand At Every Door" ends side one on a mournful psychedelic buzz, an atomic age ghost story I've always found both moving and slightly chilling.
Side two is the A-bomb. Bass lines stalking up on you, not even trying to hide. Bursts of shimmering guitar, explosions of musical color. People didn't think "Eight Miles High" was about drugs because of the lyrics, but because of the lysergic sounds. If this wasn't what a trip felt like, it should have been. I was once working out in a 24 Hour Fitness, late at night. Usually they're blasting hip-hop or top forty in there, but this night, the guy had an oldies station on (cool). And he had it cranked to nightclub level volume. And "Eight Miles High" came on. The music seemed to descend upon me, like a mothership landing, sparkling psychedelic musical rain falling all around me. Make no mistake about it - if The Byrds had never made another good record besides "Eight Miles High", or never made another record period, they would still have earned their place in rock and roll Valhalla with this one. I can't imagine what it sounded like to hear it the first time in `66.
(Note: "Eight Miles High" was recorded January/released March 1966 (16 days before I myself was released, as a matter of fact). Revolver was recorded in April. Was somebody listening?)
Anything would be an anti-climax after "Eight Miles High". Too bad Crosby had to insist on tossing off a totally perfunctory "Hey Joe", apparently to placate the fat(head)(boy). It has nothing on The Leaves, or even Love's version, not to mention Hendrix or Patti's. All great albums have their duds. A shame they didn't bag it in favor of the headlong rush of "You Know My Rider", which say in the can till The Byrds Box Set, and is far superior.
The rest of the album may be minor, but its all pleasurable. And, in a way, it makes sense. "EMH" is a tough, make that impossible, act to follow. So "Captain Soul," an r&b riff, may not be a Byrds classic, but its a nice, even tough-sounding bit of blues (for a band about as blues-less as you can get!). "John Riley" is another trad arr not even close to "Wild Mountain Thyme", but still nicely handled if slightly rushed sounding. And the closing "Lear Jet Song" - 2:12 of cockpit/air traffic controller talk over a vamping instrumental and a chant. Minor, but very nice.
The great rock and roll albums are often more than the sum of their parts. Even in a case like Fifth Dimension, where the essential-ity of the songs clearly drops (after hitting an all-time high), it is the story that is told that matters. As "The Lear Jet Song" eases us back to earth from the heavens, we know we've been told a great one.
Please Please Me (Parlophone PMC 1202)
Released 1963
I Saw Her Standing There
Misery
Anna (Go To Him)
Chains
Boys
Ask Me Why
Please Please Me
Love Me Do
P.S. I Love You
Baby It's You
Do You Want To Know A Secret
A Taste Of Honey
There's A Place
Twist And Shout
Buddy Holly. Chuck Berry. Heard it all before, Brian. Guitars. On their way out, Brian. (fictitious record executive in the 1980 film, "Birth of the Beatles")
I never thought he said fuck, but it did sort of sound like it, didn't it? More importantly, what a great way to kick off the first song on your first album. Even better that the song that kicks off that first album is one thrilling ride. The great albums always let you know you're getting into something special within their first few seconds. Wham! If you'd never heard the group before, that opening 2:54 would let you know instantly you were into something good. Greil Marcus once referred to the Beatles as practicing "rock group dynamics so fluid and intelligent that for years they made nearly everything else on the radio sound faintly stupid." That concept is hard to articulate, but listen here and you can hear it. Paul's fluid, melodic and inventive bass (he's the most underrated bass player in rock), Ringo's in the pocket rapid-fire drums, George's razor-sharp licks and the way all of the above coalesces together. It's breathtaking. And it rocks. I challenge you to sit on your ass when Please Please Me kicks off. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.
Amazing to me now is how fully-formed they sound. In those just under three minutes, you can hear almost every card The Beatles had to play. This is not because The Beatles didn't have a full hand - it's because "I Saw Her Standing There" is that loaded. A hologram of their music.
What I hear, listening to Please Please Me, is the amazing mix, the lightning in a bottle that was The Beatles. Skill. Absolute mastery as musicians - never flashy, always tasteful, and always immaculate - and at the same time, never lacking an iota of depth or feeliing. They had the emotion, the passion, the feel that every raw roots and punk-rocker strives for and they could play and sing brilliantly by any standard. Not only had they mastered the playing, they'd mastered the genres. Listen to Please Please Me and you hear a band who've assimilated rockabilly, soul, r&b, doo-wop, fifties and sixties pop, folk music, girl groups, Buddy Holly, the Everly brothers, Motown, Arthur Alexander and showtunes - the whole of popular music of their era - and brewed these forms into a single, identifiable style that is always completely their own. The earliest Beatles records (i.e. this one and a handful of contemporaneous singles) do not show a band in their childhood. This is a fully-formed, mature artistic unit at the height of their powers. That they would not only evolve beyond this, but so far beyond this, is the truly amazing part.
Swinging right into "Misery," something of a Buddy Holly/Everly Brothers pastiche - yet (again) wholly their own. And then Arthur Alexander's "Anna," a bittersweet lost-love kissoff ballad (Alexander must have been popular in the UK - The Stones covered him, too). This was John's first moment in the sun. Paul, George and Ringo were the outstanding musicians. John's great gift (aside from songwriting and challenging the status quo) was as a singer. He had a good, not conventionally pretty, but more accessible than, say, Dylan, singing voice. But it was passion that he brought to it. He may not be able to cut Arthur Alexander here, but he can hold his own - the depth of feeling is all there. It's one of Alexander's best songs and one of Lennon's best performances. "Chains" is George's first moment, "Boys" Ringo's. Both are minor girl-group numbers (though "Chains" was, I believe, a hit for The Cookies). They show both the breadth of the Fab Four's reach for repertoire. More importantly, they show how they could make a song their own. "Chains" is pure rockabilly, driven by George's steely guitar. "Boys" is more of the same, only downer, dirtier, and hitting even harder, riding on the massive beat. Ringo slams the music home, driving it forward. His muted, underplayed vocal somehow only brings the power of the beat even more into focus. "Ask Me Why" is a minor, very standard romantic number with good lyric rhymes - even their throwaways were always polished - and a nice Buddy Hollyesque vocal. It only sets the stage for the title track. "Please Please Me" is where they really hit their stride - Buddy Holly lyric cues ("I don't want to sound complaining but you know there's always rain in my heart"), but it's the call and response - Come On (Come On)... Come On (Come on) ... Come On (Come On)...! Come On (COME ON)!!! - that give the song its power, roaring it forward like a speeding train.
"Love Me Do" is a minor fab four number that mostly gets by on its considerable charm (like most minor Beatles songs). It has a nice Everly Bros meets Jimmy Reed feel. "P.S. I Love You" is similarly minor but has nice harmony vocals. "Baby It's You" is the Smokey Robinson song and, like "Anna", Lennon gives it his all in deeply felt vocal. It shows again how The Beatles, one of the whitest rock bands imaginable, could adapt pure soul to their own idiom, giving it their own sound and sheen, without sacrificing depth of feeling. Lennon's vox here and on "Anna" are some of the finest he would ever turn in, yet without any of the histrionics he would later bring in his post-Beatles music. With the Beatles, less was always more.
"Do You Want To Know A Secret" is another small number, very much in the mode of some of Buddy Holly's slighter, sweeter songs. Again, it gets by mostly on charm. "A Taste Of Honey," cribbed from the film of the same name. On the surface, a sop to middlebrow fans who wanted showtunes. Look deeper. A folk melody - the sort of the thing the Beatles always integrated, assimilated into their music (just as they did everything else) while still making it distinctly their own (just as they did everything else).
The album's been getting soft for a while now, but "There's A Place" shifts it back into gear. A shimmering, incandescent number, it anticipates the more sophisticated songwriting of A Hard Day's Night and beyond, and the musical waves of The Byrds with its ringing, symphonic guitars (a generations worth of jangly pop bands in the 80's would strive for this sound - and miss).
With great albums, you know when the end has come. Here you know it when the band kicks into "Twist and Shout", another soul thumper they made their own - so much so that few remember the Isley Bros original (much less the Top Notes). No reason they should. The Isley's version was a throwaway. The Beatles' - a last stand. With the band riding another powerhouse Ringo beat (the rhythm kicks so hard you don't even notice the song is actually pretty slow-tempo) and Lennon cutting loose with a spoon-size shredded vocal (the next time someone complains about singer with less-than-pretty voices being unable to sing, slap this on) as they tear up each chord, each lick, each drumroll, building up to the mounting series of "aaaaaah -aaaaaaaah-AAAAAAAH-AAAAAAAWOW!"'s that drive the chorus back into the verse time and again. When they slam into the final crash of drums`n'chords, you know you've heard something final.
Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (DB Records DB 73)
Released 1984
Trail Of Tears
Fire From Heaven
Sleepers Awake
Gilbert Takes The Wheel
Ghost On The Road
Watusi Rodeo
Why DoThe Heathen Rage?
Pillow Talk
Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (Part 1)
Kumbayah
We were walking through the square one day in Marietta. It was the Fourth of July, and they were having a festival or something - a gospel group was singing something that sounded like "walking in the shadow of the big man" (John Poe, quoted in SPIN, 1985)
"Sun hangs low in the Western sky" shouts Murray Attaway, "I bow my head and I remember now - someone's lips pressed close to mine, her cool hand upon my brow." The chords are crashing around him.
Guadalcanal Diary always made a lot out of African imagery. The cover may depict a pair of Africans in some kind of ceremonial garb, but the music always evokes for me wide open plains - Texas? The Veldt? Maybe they're all the same ("Watusi Rodeo" would have it so). The songs drip with Southern Gothic. "Trail Of Tears," with its images of lonely war widows and weary soldiers ("Two girls wait at the railroad track/For their soldiers to come back/Knowing this will be their last") and figures of death recalls that old Twilight Zone episode about the Civil War dead parading past the house of a lonely widow. It's as full of mystery as the centuries-old cowboy songs it evokes.
Attaway was obsessed with ghosts and the realm of the spirit. "Fire From Heaven" uses a mournful, Byrdsy stomp (emphasis on STOMP!) evokes loneliness and despair and the turning to higher powers ("All the power of heaven, no moon on nights like this"). The picture may never be clear, but its a bleak one. "Sleepers Awake" is even more ominous, with its images of "dusty eyes" and its mournful tone. The sun is going down. No moon on nights like this.
A ringing guitar, more whomping drums and a stomping chorus, "Gilbert Takes the Wheel" an instrumental evocative of "Emotions" from Love's first album, may actually be my favorite track on the album. Like all great rock records, it makes perfect sense, transitioning the eerie spirituality of "Sleepers" into the sordid ghost story of "Ghost On The Road", a surf-like tale of loss, death and ghosts, as a man cruises the highway, night after night, looking for the ghost of his lost love: "Driver never sleeps, engine never slows, they say he'll stop one day and look back to see a girl who waits by the bend".
One side of ghosts and phantoms and dark religious imagery. In the wrong hands this would all be potentially pretentious, but what makes it work is the band's overpowering roots/rockabilly/folk/surf attack. Back in the day, people always compared Guadalcanal to R.E.M. (both Georgia, both jangly). But, aside from some ringing chords and superficial vocal resemblance, there was no comparison. GD had a sheer drive and power to their music - Attaway's furiously strummed rhythm guitar driven by John Poe's whomping drums (one review called them "ridiculously overmixed", but I think they sound great). Over it all the estimable Jeff Walls played lead guitar that would have done any band proud, and he and Attaway wrote better songs than the Athens crew ever dreamed of.
Side two shows the band's other side. GD was always possessed of a sly, often silly sense of humor their records never caught (for this, you had to see them live - they were an extraordinary live band). "Watusi Rodeo", the story of a cowboy seized by a flying saucer and dropped off in Africa, where he now herds water buffalo, is pure psychobilly heaven. "Why Do the Heathens Rage" is more of Attaway's strange religious obsession, and minor, except for the band's full-throttle delivery. But "Pillow Talk", a kind of updated Everly Brothers song, the tale of a jealous man with a sleep-talking girlfriend who "mention(s) every guy in town but me" during her somnambulistic oratory, is a gem. Another, lesser instro bridges "Pillow Talk" and the big finale.
See, I never went to camp. Never was a scout. I bailed on Sunday school at the age of five. So "Kumbayah" was unknown to me when I first heard this record at age 19. Hilarious that I, even then a muso extraordinaire, should be unaware of a song seemingly everyone else in the friggin' country knows by heart. Guess I missed out. Anyway, starting from its choked-chord opening, "Kumbayah" builds into power chord paradise as the band hit the choruses harder and harder, the sheer drive of its sing-along catchiness and the power of the playing become overwhelming. Recorded live, as they hit the "someone's shouting lord - KUM-BAY-AH!" verses you can hear the audience shouting back with greater and greater fervor at each turn. I saw the band nearly half-a-dozen times in the 80's, and this was always their encore, and every time, even when we knew it was coming, it whipped the crowd into a near holy-roller fever (my favorite rendition included a mid-song segue into "Stayin' Alive" before roaring back into campire-land). As an album closer, its genius.
Guadalcanal Diary made three more albums, this time for Elektra. All were enjoyable but none captured the fever the way Walking, all dust and mad southern preachers and ghosts, did. But they bought their into heaven with this one.
