Led Zeppelin – IV

So tonight marks something of a landmark in my musical listening, namely, that I now have Led Zeppelin albums and have actually been listening to them. Yes, I know there’s no reason a healthy 27 year old music fan (rock n’ roll fan, at that) should go through life without listening to Led Zeppelin, but such has been my reality up until tonight. I figured I’d best mark such an event with a bit of an “early impressions” writeup of one of the most famous albums in music:

This sudden influx of Led Zeppelin (or “Lep”, as I accidentally called them while chatting with a friend, and that kind of stuck so I’m going to use it) into my life came at the expense of a dear friend, that is, my Zune. See, I bought the sucker from Best Buy and, being one who has destroyed 5 Mp3 players in the past couple of years, opted for the additional protection plan. Indeed, when the thing died, I was awarded a gift card with all the money I paid for the thing on it, and the Sansa I replaced it with, even with the additional case and 16GB memory card, only used up about half of that store credit, so I had a surplus of monies to spend. Certainly, if they had awarded me cash, I would have given it to charity or used it to feed the homeless, but since this was store credit, I had to find something that cost around $100 that could be found at Best Buy.

Hence, I bought the complete Led Zeppelin box-set, thus taking my Lep collection from “0″ to “everthing” in one fell swoop. I have spent nearly all of the time between then and this writing listening to each album in a row. Of course, I have been happy with my purchase (which, after store credit, amounted to $2.14 out of my pocket, not a bad price to pay for ROCK), and when it came time to figure out what I wanted to write about today, of course I knew what I had to do.

Certain publications have dubbed the no-name fourth album from Lep as “the best album ever”, and it’s nice to see that distinction given to someone who’s not The Beatles. Nevermind that “best ever” is within the confines of “Hard Rock” only; in listening to mandolin/acoustic guitar stuff like “The Battle Of Evermore” and “Going To California” can hardly be called “hard” rock, but that should just go to show you how much of the rest of the album rocks.

Indeed, though tonight was my first time listening to The Album Which Is Not Named, I’ve easily heard at least half of it from various sources; even someone with as much self-inflicted shelteredness can’t escape these songs. Sure, I may not have known that “Black Dog” was that song with that riff, but I still think about that song with that riff every time I think of this band. Even though I have had it spelled out to me in Wikipedia, I still can’t tell you what kind of time signature this is, but that’s mainly because, despite being a bit of a Prog fan, weird time signatures kind of scare and excite me.

One of the reasons I had not gotten around to listening to Led Zeppelin, even while growing my digital music collection exponentially with my short-lived Zune Marketplace membership, is because I found it remarkably hard to find Lep material on the web. Yeah, sure, I could get it all on iTunes, but why pay the per-song price when the box-set is actually cheaper? I couldn’t find it on Zune unless I purchased it, in DRM’d .wma 192kbps files. Yeah, I and my $500 headphones say no thank you, Microsoft.

The weird thing is, even back in my pirating days, I couldn’t find Zeppelin stuff in any kind of quality. Apparently the band’s fogeyism when it comes to digital distribution reached out to their fans, who are not known to be the most scrupulous bunch, unless they are collectively ignoring anti-drug laws but abiding by anti-piracy ones, but I digress.

The point is, I know the album’s second song, “Rock And Roll”, because I heard it in a damn car commercial. I’m just saying, Lep, maybe you can let up the slack on letting people actually hear your music? Either way, “Rock And Roll” is still a great song, calling upon the early, bygone (even in the 70′s) days of the genre. Deep Purple did the same with their cover of “Lucille” and their song “Speed King”, but neither had the same effect as “Rock And Roll”, and Robert Plant put out a much more generally appealing squealy high note than Ian Gillan, but let’s not fight over this, both bands are trillionaires.

The only song that I kind of scratch my head over is the song “Misty Mountain Hop”. The song barely holds together, and it’s almost like the band recorded it in 4 seperate rooms without listening to any of the other parts (and without a common beat), and then the whole thing was duct-taped together. Not that it’s a bad song, how can a song about marijuana and Lord Of The Rings be all that bad? I’m just saying, if we’re talking about the best rock album ever made, some attention should be drawn towards what I would call the weakest link.

Of course, the song “Four Sticks” is much more like it, providing this kind of crazy beat that has its own novella of a story behind it. Basically, the drummer is using four sticks, so the song is called “Four Sticks”. However, though it’s not my place to directly quote Wikipedia, I do kind of like this blurb about what happened when the guys tried to play it with an Indian orchestra:

“The project is said to have run into problems because the orchestra didn’t keep time in the Western style and some of them drank rather a lot.”

That’s just great, I also love how Robert’s crooning in the very last part of the song sounds like it’s being pitch-corrected, way before such technology existed. Seriously, this band had to have worshipped Satan to get such technology so early, if indeed the legends are true and Satan is actually Cher.

One more note about “Going To California”, I absolutely love the kind of diminished chord parts that occur between the mandolin and guitar between singing parts. That and the echoey minor-key verses that Robert Plant belts out make this a reall appealing song, despite being, in no way, Hard Rock.

Finally, we’ve got “When The Levee Breaks”. Now, I know that Led Zeppelin got in trouble for stealing a lot of things (apparently they didn’t give writing credits to a blues guy after playing his song), but to rip a beat off the Beastie Boys? Totally not cool, guys, I don’t care if you ARE the biggest band in the world.

All right, joking aside, “When The Levee Breaks” is actually a really awesome song, perhaps one of the few examples of a legit “Hard Rock” song where the harmonica is one of the main players. This song is really sludgy and slow-moving not only because of the ominous, thundering beat (which, again, has an entire encyclopedia’s worth of writing dedicated to how it was done, basically your man John was at the bottom of some stairs and was recorded from the top of the stairs), but because of the fact that it was played faster and then slowed down to pitch. This move would later be callously copied by my own heroes Gentle Giant on the song “Working All Day” from Three Friends. Whether this really cool move was intentionaly ripped off or not, I don’t care to know, I just know this album predates at least 90% of the technology that was used to create it, meaning that Lep probably were all sorcerers.

Either way, these sorcerers have conjured their ways directly into my heart, and despite what I’ve heard about one of these albums, I am sure I’ll continue to enjoy them, even if on a much cheaper Mp3 player.

Fun Fact: I considered the idea of writing about one Lep album a day until I got through all of them, to make up for lost time. I instantly regretted the idea, though I am sure I will be revisiting them within the month and a half I have left on this album-a-day blog.

Also I feel like I’m forgetting something… oh well!

John Lee Hooker – Endless Boogie

Oh brother, do I have the blues today. In situations like these, where the blues just seem to last forever, you gotta have an album, a blues album, that never ends just to cope. In my mind (or, at the least, my album collection), there is only one antidote for the endless blues, and that’s John Lee Hooker’s Endless Boogie:

As much of a student of The Blues I may claim to be from time to time, I have to admit that John Lee Hooker, one of the genre’s most revered legends, is a bit of an enigma to me. I know that his style was unique, he was based in Detroit, and the man had The Blues like no other, but past that, I can’t even find much information on this album, even the cast of other musicians is inconsistent across various websites. I guess it’s my fault for only possessing this album digitally, thanks death of tangible media!

Anyways, none of that truly matters, though it usually helps to flesh out these writeups for me to have actual information. There’s not a lot you have to know about John Lee Hooker, the man had the good fortune to live long enough to put out like 300 albums, and this the only one of those I actually have. Thing is, I also have a “best of” John Lee Hooker compilation, and have had that thing for over half my life, and when I was looking at this album initially, I was kind of worried because a large chunk of that “best of” album are tracks that are on this album too, so is it truly an album or just another compilation?

I found out, through some crack research, that the reason there are so many of the songs from this album is because it’s just that good. They also weren’t kidding when they said it was “endless”, it’s a double album of mostly 6+ minute tracks, totalling about an hour and a half.

Thing is, when it comes to John Lee Hooker, you’re not going to get an album of generic blues songs with their usual 12 bars and 1 – 4 – 5 chord structure. Nah, anybody who listens to John Lee for long enough will probably realize that there’s no actual need for bars, because there are usually no actual chord changes, and John just sings whenever he pleases. Heck, there’s not even a set melody to these songs, and sometimes the rhythm gets changed half-way through the song (not in this album, though). Basically, all there is to the sound of John Lee Hooker is the boogie, and the instruments that ride along with it.

In the case of Endless Boogie, those instruments are played by John’s usual bassist and drummer (I really have to pity that poor bassist, I can hardly play two notes in a row, much less just one note for 11 minutes straight) and a host of other musicians who are white (I don’t see how this is a big deal, white people often assisted with the blues in the 70′s), including some prominent “weird guitar” solos from Steve Miller.

To call this a “jam” album would be an understatement. I mean, what else are you going to do with a 6 minute long song that doesn’t have any chord changes? As I understand, John Lee was pretty much illiterate, so it’s not like he could write down 6 minutes’ worth of lyrics (often his lyrics were just a few lines repeated endlessly and the rest was just made up on the spot). Still, this isn’t the kind of “jamming” where all the musicians just take predictable turns going “Hey look how good I am!”, but the whole song just kind of swells up with extra playing, like the whole band would feel the waves of musical passion at the same time, and would respond accordingly. This is a way of playing the blues that I believe is actually extinct nowadays, but I haven’t done much exploring lately in what’s going on with the genre lately, so that’s only a theory.

Even if the songs are jams, that doesn’t mean they aren’t clever. Something like “Standin’ At The Crossroads” is just a standard song about his baby leaving him, but there are some memorable numbers to be found, especially with the song “House Rent Boogie”. In it, John tells the story about how he lost his long-time job, and being kicked out of his house, being turned down by his old friends, and then eventually conning his way back into his old place by sweet-talking the landlady. Though this story sounds fairly mundane, it’s the way that John Lee tells it, with his knack for dialogue and timing and, of course, the stunning yet subtle musicianship at work, and it’s a Blues song you could easily listen to even if you’re not a fan of the Blues. You find yourself rooting for John’s vagrancy and arrogance he displays at the very end of the song, when he knows everything is working out in his favor.

Still, there wouldn’t need to be lyrics in the album’s centerpiece, the 11 minute long “Pots On, Gas On High”, because it’s the first instance of a “fast” boogie in the album, and the beat is so addicting (there are almost no fills in the entire duration of the song, only slight modifications to the core beat here and there), you just want to tap your foot or shake it to this song forever. Of course, there is a song in there somewhere, but since I just discredited it in the beginning of this paragraph, we’ll try and forget about it.

Another bit of a surprise in this album is the song “Kick Hit 4 Hit Kix U” (a nearly-illiterate way of saying “Kick it before it kicks you”). The song tells, in the most straight-forward, no-nonsense way imaginable, the fact that Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both died recently, of drugs, and that you should not do drugs, and that you should quit drugs, even if you don’t want to. The song’s pretty lyrically dense, as John goes on and on about not doing drugs, and it’s just fascinating to listen to, because there’s no real “tribute” here to the fallen heroes, only a plain spoken appeal to logic. It’s a fascinating song, to be sure.

The album touches on many more points in the interim, such as depression (I know that depression is implicit in Blues lyrics, but “Sittin’ In My Dark Room” takes an uncharacteristically isolationist view of it), having sex with women (“Doin’ The Shout” is probably the stand-out classic of the album), leaving women, having women leave you, and the wonderfully titled “We Might As Well Call It Through (I Didn’t Get Married To Your Two-Timing Mother)”.

Still, the whole thing amounts to what is one of my very favorite Blues songs ever, the 9 minute, psychedelic-tinged “Endless Boogie, Parts 27 and 28“. In it, an infectious guitar riff (that I am pretty sure I heard in a ZZ Top song or something somewhere) introduces an even faster, straight-forward blues beat. This song actually does have chord changes, but it’s no problem, because the instrumentation is fairly unique among even the other songs on the album, blending acoustic (maybe even unplugged electric?) picking with effects-laden solos that sometimes stray adorably out of the song’s actual key (and remember, effects were actually awesome back in 1971). When the few words do come in, you may expect something profound after such a concerted jam, but in fact this is all John Lee Hooker has to say about it:

Hey, what can I say
Hey, what can I say to you baby
To make you mad this time?

All the cats have got together and just cookin’
Sit down in the studio and just cooking
They call it the jam
Let’s go!

And exactly how can someone stay down after hearing that? I feel better already.

King Crimson – Islands

I was warned about Islands. Ever since I went on a bit of a collection spree with King Crimson, whose albums Larks’ Tongue In Aspic and In The Court Of The Crimson King intrigued me so. The albums made in the band’s unstable time between, oh who am I kidding, they’ve always been unstable. Either way, I was told to avoid this and the nearby album Lizard while I’m at it.

Well, I didn’t listen to any advice on the matter, and now Islands one of my favorite Crimson albums. Eat that, logic and reason:

I am going to stop short of saying this album is “unique” among King Crimson’s catalogue, because really “unique” kind of goes hand-in-hand with this band. For goodness’ sakes, in the 90′s they toured as a “double trio” with two guitarists, two bassists, and two drummers. In this particular instance, however, they have a different drummer who was only there for this album (who himself replaced a one-album drummer who played on Lizard), and a new bassist/vocalist.

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure that Robert Fripp didn’t really intend for all his singers to also play bass, it’s about half-coincidence that a few of them did. Indeed, the idea to teach new vocalist Boz Burrell how to play the bass in order to be the bassist/vocalist for King Crimson arose more out of not being able to find an actual bassist. Why not? It worked twice before!

Indeed, Boz Burrell made a fine bassist, and in fact his bassy contributions to this album are among my favorite parts of Islands. Perhaps because he suffered from New Guy Syndrome, where he played the parts with an especially large amount of care because he was kind of new at the whole bass thing, or maybe he was just naturally good, or maybe, and this is the most likely scenario, Robert Fripp was such a hard-ass about things that Burrell was just trained extremely well in the short time allotted. Either way, Burrell did so well on the bass that, upon leaving King Crimson directly after this album, he went on to be the bassist for Bad Company, a gig which lasted him the rest of his life, which unfortunately came to an end a couple of years ago.

Boz Burrell was an interesting addition to the group, now that I’ve read up on him a bit. He had some really crazy near-brushes with success; he once auditioned to be the replacement for Roger Daltry when The Who was planning on firing him, and was only thwarted by the fact that they didn’t. He also had a brief solo career wherein he was joined by Ritchie Blackmore, who was just about to start Deep Purple at the time, though he wasn’t asked to join or anything. I guess he would just have to settle for being a member of King Crimson for a while.

Anyways, the actual Islands album is a funny old thing. It starts with a crazy, pounding cello arrangement, which doesn’t seem to just be a trick of the Mellotron, as it has some real scratchy bowing bits that I don’t think were a feature of that particular instrument, but who knows. There is a “double bass” player mentioned in the liner notes. The lyrics to “Formentera Lady” are a poetic thing, mainly describing scenery, and seem to be drawn from The Odyssey by Homer. I’m not entirely sure about this, because I haven’t read the book, but Odysseus makes an appearance, so good enough!

The song is about 10 minutes long and, like most of the album, doesn’t really utilize that much air space “efficiently”, spending in fact the first 2 minutes of the song just noodling around that cello and an oboe. Still, there are at least several minutes’ worth of good music to be heard here, mainly held together by Boz’s solid bass-line (which I believe is just one note throughout) and Ian Wallace’s steady drumming. After the song proper is over, there is more noodling, but this time with all instruments involved aside from the monotone bass (though it does occasionally get a nice fill here and there), and apparently soprano singing from a guest vocalist. Really I wonder if that person got paid for that kind of singing.

The real highlight of the album for me is the second song, “Sailor’s Tale”, which starts right at the end of the previous song with a cymbal hit that is soon fully realized as this wonderful tripping beat complete with a high-octave bass-line that together is just heavenly. The main instrumentation for the first part of the song seems to be Mellotron and saxophones. After that, the electric guitar is pounded upon and the rest of the song slows down to accommodate. Once the instrumentation comes back in and reaches a swell, it starts to switch from major key to minor key in a mode may start to sound familiar to a few of you. Why yes, that is almost exactly the kind of thing Radiohead did for their song “The National Anthem”, this song always seems to me like a 30 year predecessor to Radiohead’s horn-tastic jam. I’d be real hard-pressed to pick a favorite of the two, though.

Anyways, we return to the world of vocals with two tracks that are good but lyrically disturbing. The first is “The Letters”, which features words that I hate to hear in song, one of which is “flesh”, and the context doesn’t help any either:

With quill and silver knife
She carved a poison pen
Wrote to her lover’s wife:
“Your husband’s seed has fed my flesh”

Yeah no thanks. Anyway I don’t want to spoil the ending for you but let’s just say stuff gets melancholy from there. The instrumentation is quite good on this track, however. Even better is the weird bluesy creep-tastic “Ladies Of The Road”, which has a pounding beat in some obscure time signature, Boz singing the touching lyrics in a style that I suppose best demonstrates, in his brief tenure with King Crimson, why he almost replaced one of the most legendary voices in rock music. The lyrics are too naughty to reprint, so I’ll just say it’s a song about the Rock N’ Roll lifestyle, ironically written by a guy (Peter Sinfield) who wasn’t actually in the group (and thus, out on the road) except to write lyrics.

The album then spends about 20 more minutes fading out. Ok, not really, but this is definitely where about 90% of the potential audience for such an album may scratch their heads and eventually wander away. Basically, you’ve got “Prelude: Song Of The Gulls”, which is a classical-flavored instrumental of a humble 4 minute length, and then the title track, which is about a 3 minute song stretched out to nearly 10 minutes by piano-laden classical pieces that people kindly describe as “meditative” and perhaps more bluntly describe as “boring and also boring”. Personally, I grew up on classical music, and in fact I love sparse arrangements, so this is my favorite part of the album, besides the rocking bits.

That is the thing, in order to enjoy Islands, one has to appreciate both rocking bits and slow-as-Christmas bits, because they’re both in top form on this album, and if you took both bits away, all you’re left with is creepy Boz Burrell singing about seducing highschool-age female rock fans. You might as well listen to Motörhead if you want that.

Alice Cooper – Love It To Death

Yesterday I mentioned what happens when you take an established musical force and it’s held by gunpoint by a deranged producer, either something really terrible happens (like yesterday’s album), and sometimes something amazing happens. Today we’re going to talk about the latter, in Double-Album-Cover-Vision™:

I went ahead and put up both album covers to see if you too can spot the difference.

Give up?

Alice Cooper’s thumb has been air-brushed out of the second picture, the man was so feared by the pre-Tipper Gore era of concerned parents that just having his thumb somewhere where, if Alice were completely naked, a penis might be, would have probably incited riots and Bible-burning from the clearly retarded kids these parents were raising. Thus, the LP cover was censored for a second print from Warner Bros. Anyway, this is not why I’m talking about this album, though it is one of the more amusing cover-censorship situations out there.

Basically, to my earlier point, Alice Cooper in 1970 was not the top rock act that it was toward the end of Alice Cooper being a band with a singer also called Alice Cooper instead of just a guy called Alice Cooper. The band itself, up to this point, had been another drop in the bucket of psychedelic rock acts that had gotten their start (and, often, finish) between the years of 1967 and ’69. That time, often called “idyllic” by people who can’t get words like that out of their heads, was a pretty good time for psychedelic act since everyone was on drugs, but Alice Cooper’s problem (besides terrible album covers), was that they weren’t a very good psychedelic band. For one, I’m willing to bet that any drug-crazed fiends who purchased the albums were expecting to hear a woman singing (which, if Jefferson Airplane is any indication, was something they vaguely wanted) and might have been disappointed by Alice actually being a dude. There might have been issues with the fact that these albums from what became one of the best hard rock bands ever actually didn’t rock, but you know, that one’s up to the scholars.

Clearly, this fledgling group needed some help, and their previous producer actually hated them. That help would come in the form of a brilliant producer named Bob Ezrin. Recognize that name? Well, avid readers of Album Du Jour may remember the one and only time I wrote about Kiss, and how he was the producer to help THEM through a life-saving third album by whipping them into shape and even threatening to not let their guitarist record the guitar.

Yes, Love It To Death is the first Alice Cooper band to feature Ezrin’s guiding hand. Now, I may have been telling a fib (or “metaphor”, as we in the writing business call it) when I said he held the band at gun-point, but I will say that convincing a psychedelic band to actually be cohesive probably took more than a fair share of beatings, just saying.

Indeed, it turned out that what Alice Cooper needed, as a band, was an image and songs that made any kind of sense. One idea that kind of sort of maybe proved popular for the band was pairing their horror-tinged hard rock with a “bad boy” attitude, hence the album cover above (nothing is better for rock music than controversy, turns out), and thus the Alice Cooper hit machine was finally started up.

It should come as no shock that this album is amazing. Often overlooked for the much more recognizable albums that follow it, there is one undeniable hit that was spawned from this album: “I’m Eighteen”. A song speaking directly to teenagers, the tortured lyrics of a poor soul caught between the frivolities of youth and the expectations of adulthood, believe it or not, really spoke to the kids. Of course, any kids my age who ever saw the TV show Freaks And Geeks would recognize the song as well for reasons of hilarity. The fact that the song is run on a solid engine of an instantly identifiable bluesy guitar riff instead of incoherent instrument noodling kind of helped it along as well.

Which is not to say the album doesn’t have its instrumental noodling, in fact it has some of the longest songs recorded by the band up to that point, particularly the 8 minute “Black Juju”, which stops the entire song half-way through so that Alice Cooper can whisper creepily to you. Now that’s the artist we know and love!

The real highlight of the album is on the B-side called “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry”. Being well-versed in insanity, I can tell you that it’s about a real guy, though not a real “insane” guy, just an actor who played one in the 40′s. Anyway, the song is sung from the perspective of a mental patient, and everything from Alice’s amazing vocal work (including a chilling segment of rapidly screaming “I GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE”) to the spooky instrumentation layered lightly over an actual acoustic ballad makes this song a creepy national wonder.

There are other highlights too, of course, like the short-but-rockin’ “Long Way To Go”, which features some pretty great rhythm segments, including one where the bass(?) being mute-strummed is matched with the drums over a really cool guitar solo. It’s as classic rock as it gets, really, which means it probably never got a lot of recognition among Cooper’s nearly endless string of theatrical horror songs.

One other really great thing about the end of the album is that all the songs bleed together, which is always a move I appreciate. From “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry” a track called “Sun Arise” takes the album out. I have never read an explanation for this song, but from the sounds of it, it kind of seems to be poking fun at The Beach Boys and their effervescent sound by making a kind of dirty rock version of one of their summery songs, there’s even a background vocal that kind of sounds like the theramin, and vocal harmonies all throughout the endless repetition of the chorus. This is my theory, and I think it’s a good one.

Anyway, Love It To Death was the album that introduced the formula that would fuel Alice Cooper’s success for many, many years, as evidenced by the fact that Killer (which I’ve already covered) came out in the same year and did just as well. We have Bob Ezrin to thank for helping make that happen.

Well, that was a nice story, until next time!

Alice Cooper – Killer

Told her that I came
From Detroit City
And I played guitar
In a long-haired rock and roll band
She asked me why
The singer’s name was Alice
I said listen, baby
You really wouldn’t understand

Ahh, Alice Cooper, the theatrical rock star without compare. Put away your Rob Zombies and your Marilyn Mansons and whoever else you’ve got, this is the godfather of shock, a man who for whom the phrase “is nothing sacred?” was uttered back when things actually were sacred.

It’s no secret of mine that I really dig Alice Cooper. Everything from his music to his ability to make horror actually entertaining to his personal story and his tendency to not take himself seriously jives perfectly with my sensibilities, such as they are. Of course, the horror-show antics were only just blooming when he came out with this, one of his finest early albums, Killer:

This album served as a follow-up to Love It To Death, which would be the band’s first real “hit” album. This album is, in many ways, better than the previous, at least in the grand scope of what Alice Cooper’s sound would become, and some of these songs, though not usually found on any damnable “greatest hits” compilations, are among my favorites.

The opening track and one of the bigger hits of the album, “Under My Wheels”, is an example of what I really liked about Alice Cooper’s early sound, the old rock n’ roll sound. Of course, this is technically old rock n’ roll by definition, but I’m talking about boogie blues chords and that old plain-jane 4/4 beat.  The vocal delivery from the man himself is top-notch nasally grunting, he hits every note with the necessary amount of roughness to remind you that this is new rock, you know, new for 1971.

“Be My Lover”, another song that blends the classic rules with the more modern chord changes and hard edge, is the song from which the quote that opens this writeup is derived. It’s kind of a fun and slightly naughty love song. I will say that I totally wish one of the opening lines, “…with a magnifying glance I just sort of looked her over” actually said “magnifying glass“, which would have been hilariously abstract. Shut up.

The third track, “Halo Of Flies” takes a sharp left-turn on the corner of Fripp and Floyd, the destination being an 8 minute ride to Prog town. Apparently, the reason the band decided to take such a side-trip from their established sound is just to see if they could, which I hugely admire. It may be Prog, but the cool thing about this song is that it rules. It’s got many segments where the beat is nice and driving, and of course the vocals are much more hard-rock than the stuffy British singers of the day, and there’s a segment where the bass just keeps de-tuning itself, to marvelous effect. There’s also a nice middle-eastern breakdown roughly halfway through that I enjoy. There’s lots to love in this song, your 8 minutes will not have been in vain, in fact I think I might learn the bass-line to this song, as it sounds really fun.

Another “hit” from the album, “Desperado”, has a lot of origins, apparently, so I won’t talk about that. The song introduces the actual theme of killing, which seems rather overdue since we’re now fairly close to the album’s B-side. It’s a catchy-as-hell song that sounds nothing like Country or Western, yet still conveys the imagery of a lone gunman fairly well. Other than that, don’t get entirely too used to such pretty violins and cellos in Alice Cooper’s music, but please do enjoy it while it’s here.

“You Drive Me Nervous” is the first legit horror-song on the album as far as I can tell. It’s all minor chords and madness and lots of shouting and wailing of guitar notes, and pair that with a dual-lead-guitar duo, and now you’ve got the makings of a long-standing hit, which is what I understand this song to be. It’s hard for me to put into words how rad this song is, because it’s just that rad.

Now that the B-side of the album is well under way, we return to bluesy classic rock for some reason. The song “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” is pretty great, but is quite an abrupt switch back to the front of the album that I tend to forget about after such a trilogy of awesome tracks. Still, no complaints, this song has some great bass-work and some of that wonderful trademark screaming. The guitar solo is also more of a “noise” solo, so wins all around!

A fancy-pants minor-key bass solo opens up one of the “notorious” tracks on the album, “Dead Babies”. The song is not bad, in fact it’s a very poignant anti-child-abuse track, but nonetheless when you’re a guy who looks like Alice Cooper with an album called “Killer” featuring a snake on the front, and one of your songs is called “Dead Babies”, you’re going to bother a lot of people who will never actually hear the song. It’s really too bad if you’ve never heard this song, it’s a pop masterpiece. The dour, dangerous bass-based main lines followed by the pounding chorus where each line is followed by a brilliant guitar melody, and then the end of the chorus is filled out with a falsetto “la la la” portion that will tickle the ears of someone who cares about melody. I’m being totally serious here, The Beatles couldn’t have done better than this song.

Finally we’ve got the title track, right at the end of the album. It starts with a swinging bass-line and fingersnaps that kind of give the thing a bit of a old-scool noir feel, but then the drums come in, and oh those drums! It’s a trip-beat (if that is a definition of a beat, just imagine that the drummer is literally tripping over the drums to a hard-to-discern pattern) and though you may not think that an entire 7 minute song can be sustained on such an unsteady beat, you would be wrong. Still, even though we’ve established that you are now wrong, the beat actually does change frequently through this song as solo after wonderful solo is thrown out there between Alice’s criminal lyrics. Finally, after nearly 4 minutes of this, the song becomes very slow and dire as it’s filled with tortured screams and guitars, and then the whole thing slows down into an organ dirge, then ends.

Ok, it actually doesn’t end, a judge’s gavel falls and then you’d best be prepared for the craziest high-pitched noise you’ve heard, because if you are not prepared for it, it will scare the daylights out of you.

And that’s the end, what a wonderful album! I am much more fond of the second half than the first half, but what better cure for Late Album Slowdown? Anyway how can a full length album with only 8 songs possibly even have Late Album Slowdown?

Anyway I will be writing more about Alice Cooper at later dates, expect one soon, I’m kind of on a kick! Until next time!

Deep Purple – Fireball

Man, so I got the inspiration for writing about Deep Purple again, quite on a whim, on the 27th of this month, when I wrote about them on the 25th of January, and the 22nd of February. Apparently late in the month I tend to feel like I have to get my Deep Purple on!

Well, though Deep Purple certainly has a large enough discography to check out every single month, the “best” lineup, MKII, put out only 4 albums (and one incredible live album), of which this is the second (the first being In Rock and third being Machine Head, which we’ve already covered):

Indeed, Fireball is a force to be reckoned with among 70′s brit-rock albums, and despite the fact that it’s overshadowed in the band’s catalogue by Machine Head, which was released only 6 months afterward, it’s got all the energy and some to spare.

Like the other albums, Fireball puts its best foot forward with the fast, driving, heavy, and double-bass-pedal-tastic title track. I have made no secrets about how much I enjoy songs that start with really kickin’ beats where the other instruments have to keep up, and this album delivers on that. The other instruments, of course, make catching up with Ian Paice’s amazing drumming seem like no feat at all. Of course, like most fireballs, this one burns hot but is gone after only 3 1/2 minutes, which is incredibly short for a Deep Purple tune, I gotta tell ya.

The next tune, also reminiscent of the other albums, is a bluesy jam, only unlike the other albums, it’s called “No No No” instead of something different. It’s catchy all around, but the chorus in particular will stick with you unless your mind is made of the purest teflon:

Have we got our freedom? No, no, no
Is it getting better? No, no, no
Do we love each other? No, no, no
Must we wait forever? No, no, no

Of all the Deep Purple songs dealing with protesting… well, whatever’s around… this one is probably my favorite. Not my favorite is one that will come with the 4th album in the MKII lineup, but that’s an entry for the late part of another month.

The third song… varies heavily depending on which country you bought this album in. If you bought it or downloaded it in America, you either got the version with “Strange Kind Of Woman”, or if you bought the most recent special edition, or the original version in the UK or Japan, you got “Demon’s Eye” as your third track. Of course, if you have the special edition, you have both songs, but “Demon’s Eye” is going to come up third.

“Demon’s Eye” starts off with that lovely distorted keyboard sound pounding away at a chord that the guitar joins, followed by Ian’s trademark over-the-top vocals, all set in a dire minor-key blues boogie. Interestingly enough, “Strange Kind Of Woman” is also a boogie, so it’s interesting to note that you’ve got 2 songs of similar length, both of which with nearly the same beat, only one is a song about not wanting a woman because she’s “sly like a demon’s eye” (I don’t know either), and the other is about really wanting a woman despite her being really resistant to the singer’s uhh, obvious charm. Then again, “Strange Kind Of Woman” has that last line “I won my woman just before she died”, which kind of puts an abrupt tragic spin on what started as a tale of trying to win a woman’s heart, but such is the way of rock n’ roll. You’re gonna have the occasional song where the subject, object, or everyone dies. You’ll just have to accept it.

“Anyone’s Daughter”, the pan-continental fourth song, is rather unique among its compatriots in the Deep Purple MKII discography. It’s a country-sounding jig featuring some quite good finger-picking from noted wizard Ritchie Blackmore, and also a 7th-chord heavy electric piano part. It’s immensely catchy, and then the vocals come in, and they’re not rock vocals at all! He sings the song perfectly clearly, which is good because the lyrics are fantastic. It’s about sleeping with the wrong kind of women because they’re someone important’s daughter, until the song’s ending, of course, which is a great metaphor for denouncing authority figures in society or something, I don’t know.

The next song is quite different as an album song than as a live song, where it has had a sure spot in for nearly 40 years now. The reason it is such a concert staple is because it is home to a 6-10 minute drum solo from the afore-mentioned super drummer, Ian Paice. It starts with a cool, sweeping drum beat and the tune being played by guitar and keyboard while the bass line rolls away. It’s a decent enough song, but definitely a spectacle when played live. According to Ian Gillan, it’s a song about “Lucifer, and all his friends”. Again, it’s hard to have any decent rock without the devil getting in there somewhere. Replacing the extended drum solo, in the album version, is a guitar solo and fancy drum part that then goes back to normal while the guitar solo continues to pound away. Again, drum solo, much more impressive.

After “The Mule” is a song called “Fools”, which is 8 minutes long so strap yourself in. It’s a tune mainly centered around a riff established again by the keyboard and guitar working in tandem. Those two work really well together, I should mention. The vocals come in with a soft and very in-the-background “Ahhhhh, I’m crying”, and you know you’re in for one of the more “progressive” songs that pervaded Deep Purple’s otherwise rather metallic repetoire. If you’ve got a spare 2 minutes to wait for the rocking part of the song to come in, I promise it’s well worth it. Just try not to fall asleep, otherwise that first guitar hit might wake you up unpleasantly. I kind of really love the line:

Rocks and stones won’t bruise my soul
But tears will leave a stain

It’s cheese but it’s good cheese. By the way, at around the 4 1/2 minute mark, you can get your pillow ready, because Ritchie Blackmore is going to perform, for you, his impression of a bad cello player by basically combining “tapping” on the fret board to get the notes and using the volume notes to fade every note in, with a little assistance from Jon Lord, the keyboardist. This was apparently an unescapable part of the live show as well, and smacks of pretension, but that’s Ritchie Blackmore for ya.

It should also be noted that “The Mule” and “Fools” are mixed up in name and track number on the Zune download of the special edition of this album. Zune buyers, beware! You’ll have to re-adjust the ID3 yourself, fool.

Finally, an extra-deep guitar note brings us the song “No One Came”, a song about being a old rock star who has lost all relevance who continues to pound away despite the fact that “no one came”. I would love to jab Ian Gillan at this one, but in fact the band is still selling out stadiums and, at least in Japan, they’re still very impressed. They’re on tour there right now, as I understand! So… well played!

And that’s Fireball. Another album that seems short, but you probably lost about 5 years off your life listening to the fake cello in “Fools” so the album has lengthened itself relative to the remainder of your life here on Earth. The band says “you’re welcome”.

Hot Tuna – First Pull Up, Then Pull Down

Today is one of those days that should have been far too busy/inconvenient for me to write an Album Du Jour entry. I had to work at 6am and then band practice was immediately after, and I just got home, and oh yeah I didn’t sleep last night and tonight’s not looking so good either. Now I have 2 hours to write about an album of my choice and then I will probably immediately start working on another.

Indeed, an inconvenient day for blogging, but it is upon these days that I thrive. On these days, I tend to choose albums that I am very familiar with/fond of, and today is no exception. Today we’re talking about one of my favorite live albums, the second official album from Jefferson Airplane alumni Hot Tuna:

It’s actually quite a matter of good fortune that I even own this album on CD. It went out of print some years ago and is the only Hot Tuna album not available from their official website. Strange! Either way, I was able to get one for a normal CD price on eBay, after which I sent it along to my uncle, who had been looking for the CD as well but doesn’t do so well with the internet. It is, in fact, my uncle David who introduced me to the band and their awesome sound and the influence of bassist Jack Casady, who is in top form in this live recording.

And what better way to start a live recording than with an extended instrumental! Indeed, “John’s Other” is an 8-minute Blues instrumental centered around Papa John Creach and his unique style of fiddle-playing. Despite the fact that he was 53 years old when First Pull Up, Then Pull Down was recorded, it is the first album Papa John recorded on. He would later collaborate on many Hot Tuna related projects until his death in 1994. It could be said that this introductory number is his “best song”, but in fact he uses the same 3 violin parts for pretty much every song, so it’s like every song is his best song!

Speaking of “best song”, the highlight of the album (well for me anyway) is one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s an old blues “traditional” called “Candy Man” and it’s one of those jug-band kind of blues songs that I adore with all my heart. This song might as well had been engineered by NASA to be the perfect song for me. It’s got a bouncy beat, awesome finger-picking ‘lectric guitar supplied by Jorma Kaukonen, who also provides the understated vocals, and best of all, an excellent bass-line by my hero Jack Casady which amounts to a bass solo at the end. This is one of the few bass solos that ever made it onto an album by Hot Tuna (actually I can’t think of any others so it may be the only one), and it’s a real winner. It starts innocently enough with the regular bassline, but notes are slowly added in until it becomes deceptively complicated, and then it rocks out in various ways that I wish I had the knowledge to describe. I have praised Jack’s playing before, and one of the things I always like to mention is the tone. He could get a bass to sing in a voice that is unique among bass players, and it could be because he had dozens of effects and knobs installed in his already-fancy basses, but a lot of it is in his unusual technique. What is the technique? We may never know.

Though, speaking of finger-picking, the guitar is indeed finger-picked all throughout this album, but in a different way than on the band’s first album (which I will get to, I assure you) because there are basically 2 Hot Tunas you may hear on any given day: Acoustic Hot Tuna and Electric Hot Tuna. The latter is what we hear on First Pull Up, Then Pull Down, and it’s decidedly different in mood and tone than the acoustic songs the band started off playing. They would switch between these sounds through the years, however, which is why they are almost like 2 different identities.

The next song is “Been So Long”, which is a dour minor-keyed song featuring… well, honestly this song doesn’t have a whole lot going for it compared to the rest of the album. Whoops! I still like it, though.

“Want You To Know” is another cover that features an embryonic “bounce” that would be later seen to fruition with the song “Keep On Truckin’” on Burgers. Some of the lyrics are even used for the latter, which might amount to theft but that’s what the Blues is all about.

A crunchy, almost “scrapey” guitar intro brings us into the 8 minute epic “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning”, which is one of Hot Tuna’s more popular live numbers. This particular version is riveting with its mix of blues and a bit of ol’ swing, thanks to the bass. I am not ashamed to admit that I have borrowed from this song many times while writing basslines. It’s just a superb jam. So how do you keep an 8 minute song from going boring halfway through? Go into double-time! Other than that, it might as well be an instrumental as much time as is spent in the song’s incredibly long instrumental break. I am fine with this, however, as Hot Tuna are superb instrumentalists, and in fact that is the feature in their sound. I guess that’s why most Hot Tuna fans are musicians, now if only most musicians were Hot Tuna fans!

The next song, “Never Happen No More” is another upbeat number (trust me, you’ll need it after the duration of the previous song). It’s a great song, but a little too reminiscent of “Keep On Truckin’”, since basically the exact same chords are used for both songs. The actual fidelity of this track seems lower than the rest, or else I’m just crazy.

Finally, we have the 9 1/2 minute finale to the album, “Come Back Baby”, which is a song that goes all the way back with Hot Tuna. In fact, an early version of the song can be heard on the bonus tracks to the CD reissue of Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow. The version on this album, however, is the best one I’ve heard. It’s got the addition of Papa John and the great harmonica player Will Scarlett (what a name) has some great solos all throughout. Heck, Jorma even attempts to sing a couple of notes outside of his comfort zone (which is approximately half an octave), so lots of work went into this particular track. It’s downbeat and simplistic, but full of that toneful goodness that makes every Hot Tuna album a special treat to the ears of people who listen for characteristics like that.

All in all, this is possibly my favorite Hot Tuna album, but then again my favorites always tend to be the ones I listened to last. Until tomorrow!

Gentle Giant – Acquiring The Taste

Happy Gentle Giant Day, everyone! As you may remember from last month’s article, on the 15th of every month this year I will be talking about one of the 12 albums from my favorite band. This month is particularly special because Acquiring The Taste is actually my favorite Gentle Giant album! So let’s get cracking!

First off, that’s a remarkable cover, and intentionally so. In the original LP (and LP-like CD releases), if you unfold the package, it shows you what’s really being licked. Here’s an image from the official website of the unfolded version. As I might have mentioned before, the band has quite the sense of humor.

Though I praise all but 1 of the Gentle Giant albums for their quality of songs, what really makes Acquiring The Taste stand out to me is the amount of experimentation and odd (even for this already-odd band) instrumentation. It’s a busy album, but also subdued in volume and power until the very end, an album of subtlety, if you will.

The first song, “Pantagruel’s Nativity” starts off with a group of synthesizers playing a rather spacey melody, with the rest of the instrument joining the vocals. The song is the first of 2 songs (the second would appear on a later album) that deal with a mythological character called Pantagruel, a giant who was so large that it killed his mother to give birth to him. The story is by a guy called Rabelais, and indeed I am practically illiterate when it comes to classic non-English stories, so you’ll just have to take from what what you will. At the mid-point, the song features some really cool oppressive diminished guitar things and reverb harmony that really convey a sense of creepiness to an otherwise jaunty tune (well, at least the flute and trumpet are jaunty). It’s hard to explain this track musically, to be honest with you, except to say that it is the first recorded instance of a really kickin’ vibraphone solo, an instrument that would be revisited a few times throughout the guys’ catalogue.

I have always said that, more than the others, Acquiring is Gentle Giant’s “Twilight” album, as it not only deals lyrically with the subject of the night, but the counterpart tunes “Edge Of Twilight” and “The Moon Is Down” make no mistake. “Edge Of Twilight” (video link note: wtf) opens with really quiet woodwinds and Kerry Minnear’s trademark timid vocal delivery. The whole thing starts out almost dissonant, but then the synthesizers and reverse-backwards-tracked (yes you heard me) drums come in and give a bit more sense to the whole thing. Basically the drums are run through the same kind of effect process as the vocals on “Alucard” from Gentle Giant’s inaugural album. Nearly at the song’s halfway-mark, the song makes a slight change into a kind of medley of notes seemingly chasing each other, all set to a kind of reverb that evokes some very dream-like images. Then the snare drums cadence and a timpani and xylophone come in, and build up to quite a strange structure indeed.

The mood is brought back up a bit with the slightly more rockin’ (in that Derek finally takes the reins as lead singer) “The House, The Street, The Room”. This is a song that is kind of lost if played quietly. Not just because the fussy bassline is really cool to listen to, but because twice the entire song breaks down into one of the grandest experiments I’ve heard in music. The 6 members of the band gather ’round and each one plays the same little simple riff using a large array of instruments. After the whole thing builds up, a face-rocking guitar solo comes in and sticks around for about 2 whole minutes. I should really not waste any more time trying to convince you that this song is rad, you should just know by now.

The next song is an instrumental, almost an intermission, really, since it’s so short and features only one instrument: the moog. Interestingly, there is a slight pitch bend in the very first note, where you hear it pitched lower and then coming back up (a comical noise, really), apparently this is from an error in the master tapes they used to make all the cd’s (even the super-expensive Universal Japan Remaster version I have), which was not present in the original LP’s. Why do I find that interesting? I don’t, I just know it, and I felt you should too.

The next song is probably my second favorite, a straight-up (well ok nothing is straight-up with this band but it’s straight-forward ok) shipwreck shanty called, appropriately, “Wreck“.  Though it would be another 2 albums before Gentle Giant realized they could do CRAZY polyphony, they would join together on songs like this with a simple harmony and the very catchy/intense “Hey hey-ya, hold on” between each verse. The lyrics are very dour, as they deal with the intensity of the tragic death of the victims of a shipwreck. Still, this song is the jam, and I don’t say that often about songs.

The counterpart to “Edge Of Twilight”, “The Moon Is Down”, is so-claimed-to-be by myself because each song contains the other’s title within its lyrics, and also this song starts in a similar way, only instead of woodwinds, it is introduced with very low-key saxophone/other horns. The lyrics also have that almost-backwards sound to them. See? I know what I’m talking about! Both songs are beautiful, and very appopriate for insomnia-fueled nights of reflection and star-gazing, uhhh so I hear.

The next song, “Black Cat“, is another favorite of mine, as it is themed after the prowling of a domestic cat “acting out her past jungle days”. The lyrics are referenced by violins being plucked (THAT’S CALLED PIZZICATO SEE I KNOW MUSICAL WORDS) and a wah guitar/wah violin playing “cat calls” to each other. Very entertaining, since the melody is strong enough to not make this just a foray into who can do what with instruments.

Speaking of wah violin (a Gentle Giant exclusive, as I understand), the last and best track on the album opens up with it. The violin solo’ing might be what prompts the lead guitarist, Gary Green, to loudly order fish and chips in the middle of the intro/solo. It’s pretty entertaining, but then when the funky, funky beat comes in and the riffs all lay on top of each other and Derek is singing at his soulful best, oh man this song is a 7 1/2 minute slice of fussy musical heaven. The lyrics to “Plain Truth” are great, too, as they denounce fully a life full of expectations that are just going to go unmet, and in fact gives some very simple instructions in that regard:

Why do you question
When there’s no answer told?
Plain truth is nothing
You can’t buy it when it’s sold

Save all your money
And they won’t reason why
Why all the worry?
They’ll spend it when you die

Don’t look for something
Plain truth is nothing,
nothing but the plain truth

You stand and wonder
Just let it warm your skin
Take all the living
Live life and let it win

Plain truth means nothing
Cry, laugh and cry again
You question answers
Born, live and die, Amen

Don’t look for something
Plain truth is nothing,
nothing but the plain truth

YES. Just YES.

So that’s Acquiring The Taste, an album that has been wrongfully called Gentle Giant’s “least accessible” album, but in fact I say it’s one of the best ways to get a stranger to their sound acclimmated to a sound that is fussy but can’t be accused (like their later work) of being “cheesy”. The band put it fairly well themselves in the liner notes:

“It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary music at the risk of being very unpopular. we have recorded each composition with the one thought – that it should be unique, adventurous and fascinating. It has taken every shred of our combined musical and technical knowledge to achieve this. From the outset we have abandoned all preconceived thoughts on blatant commercialism. Instead we hope to give you something far more substantial and fulfilling. All you need to do is sit back, and acquire the taste.”

Indeed the band, towards the end, did strive for blatant commercialism, and that was a tragic thing indeed (as we’ll discuss later), but they weren’t kidding when they said this album is far more fulfilling. This album is my favorite Gentle Giant album because it’s clearly the guys at their best, and even though they would make albums that are far superior in arrangements and musicality, just the adventure involved in this outlet makes it the most exciting to listen to every time.

This is not to say anything to the detriment of any but 1 of the band’s other albums, each one is just as good in its own way. I merely state a preference when I say this one is my favorite, indeed the next two albums are two other favorites, and I can’t wait to get to them! So, until next time!