King Crimson – Lizard

Greetings, fellow persons!

Sorry about the delay in updates, but this whole week was spent doing some awesome stuff like “modding” my Mp3 player to do amazing things like play video game soundtracks and Bejeweled on top of its already awesome audiophilic capabilities (I’m totally a FLAC fiend now). Also I had to do holiday shopping, attend parties and, oh yeah, finally obtain some gainful employment, since this blog doesn’t pay for itself unfortunately.

Thus, it’s been a hectic, confusing, yet ultimately rewarding week for me, so I have decided to top it all off with an album that… well ok I selected this at random, but here you go, King Crimson’s Lizard:

Yeah keep telling me you miss the olden days of album covers. I'm listening.

While looking back at old entries of this here blog, I was surprised at first that I never wrote about this album, but then I remembered the very important reason why: I had no idea what to say about it.

All I could remember about my first listen to Lizard was NOTES and then NOOOOTES (Notes). I really don’t think any coherent thought entered my mind in the 42 1/2 minutes of the album’s run-time, which is odd because this blog might show you that I have a lot of thoughts about music usually.

Fast-forward a year or so, and something magical happened: a guy from a prog group called Porcupine Tree decided to work with Robert Fripp to painstakingly remaster, from the original master tapes, ALL of the King Crimson catalogue. Despite this being a very good idea, since master tape remasters are practically the only way to get these ancient albums to sound good on modern mp3/vgm/Bejeweled players, it was also kind of a predictable idea, since King Crimson had already issued 30th AND 35th Anniversary remasters of their old material. Still, from the master tapes, maaaaan.

Among the first albums to be remastered, quite mysteriously, was Lizard, so this is where I gave Lizard what I would consider my first true listen. Then again. Then again. Then again… to be honest, I’m not done listening to it, but at least I’ve finally formulated enough opinions to write a blog entry!

Fact is, I had so much trouble coming up with a single coherent thought about the album because there isn’t a single coherent thought IN the album. I have now listened to the album dozens, possibly hundreds of times, and I know every single note by heart, but I can’t begin to try and guess why any two of them are put together the way they are.

Of course, the 40th anniversary re-issue of the album comes with some  pretty interesting liner notes (penned by Fripp himself) which, when paired with the Internet, paints a rather interesting story about the album’s production.

Without going into too much detail about the band’s personnel problems in those early days between 1967 and 2009, I will say that King Crimson were basically like watching a typical teenage garage band go through the motions of getting together, going nowhere, and breaking up, except instead of that middle bit, you’ve got “becomes the biggest rock band in the world for a while”. Despite having the world in the palm of their hands through a combination of VERY quickly cultivating a uniquely complex sound the likes of which had never been heard, showcasing extraordinary musicianship with even more extraordinary focus on music rather than image, and as Fripp put it himself, being in the right place at the right time, King Crimson simply could NOT get started on that crawling thing before they were already running.

At the time that Lizard was being recorded, they had already lost vocalist/bassist/donut fiend Greg Lake to a little-known band whose name escapes me at the moment, and that was after losing everybody else as well. Basically, Fripp was a man without a band (but his non-musician lyricist remained, more on that later), so he decided to rebuild from scratch.

Apparently Fripp didn’t get the memo that you’re not supposed to include a jazz pianist and four woodwind/brass players in your hard rock band, so that’s exactly what he did. Still, if you were the only member of a garage band that left you and the only other musicians you know from school are in the marching band, are you going to say no?  Also joining the fray is, not kidding, his actual highschool bandmate/roommate Gordon Haskell on bass and vocals, and the only drummer he could find who would take part in this mess, a hero by any standard named Ian McCulloch.

With this motley crew of masterful musicians, Fripp finally had a force to be reckoned with; a band that would record an album that, maybe this time, would not sound quite so much like a repeat of In The Court.

Well, it sure wasn’t a repeat of In The Court, in sound or amount of success, but the fact that the album even happened is perhaps even more a miracle than the huge success that was the band’s first album. Basically, let’s just say that collecting such an assorted cast of kids did not lead to a lot of civilized agreement of ideas, and when your vocalist/bassist is only good at one of those things and doesn’t even like the music, well… let’s talk about the music!

It starts off with some synthy kind of harp strumming sounds, which is not bad, and then Haskell’s voice kind of staggers into the door spilling cough medicine (the type that they ban in most countries) all over the place, and your first thought might well be “Dude, do you need to lie down or turn on a humidifier or something?” And then he punches you and you can hear the wail of ambulance sirens as the paramedics revive you and, oh wait, that’s just Fripp’s guitar playing brash, diminished bits on his guitar as Gordon’s voice comes back in with all the clarity of a wet shoe.

Still, it’s hard to tell what’s more congested, Gordon’s voice or Peter Sinfield’s lyrics. The first track is called “Cirkus” (back before Mortal Kombat made it decidedly un-cool to replace c’s with k’s willy-nilly), and is full of rather obnoxious words strung together by pure pretense, which would seem like faulty songwriting if not for the fact that the same can be said about the music itself.

The material gets even more ridiculous afterward, in fact the song “Indoor Games” ends with a genuine burst of laughter from Haskell as he attempts to figure out how best to emotionally deliver the line “Hey ho”. An understandable bemusement, to tell the truth. Add to this some rather intriguing clean guitar riffs trading off with the saxophone, and you’ve got a song that is by no means bad, if bad songs are something you like.

The next song, “Happy Family“, doesn’t feature any corpsing, but does contain some thinly-veiled allegorical statements about The Beatles, a somewhat well-known rock band from whom Fripp apparently derived the idea to make an entire band around recreating the musical shock that was the ending to Sgt. Pepper. To be honest, the lyrics might be terrible in this piece as well, but Gordon’s voice is so well hidden behind a rather tasty synthesizer effect (plus his own natural store of phlegm and wintertime nuts) that, mercifully, not a word can be understood by humans.

After all that fun nonsense, we go into WHOAH WHERE DID THAT FLUTE COME FROM… I mean, “Lady of the Dancing Water”, a song that calms the storm of weirdness either to prepare the listener for what is to come, or to try and make up for the rather melody-free events that had previously transpired. It’s a very pretty song, but I wish anyone other than Gordon Haskell had sung it, because seriously somebody give him a shot of adrenaline; I think he’s had some kind of reaction.

Finally, the fifth and final track of the CD (or the entire B side to the record) is a 23 minute opus called “Lizard”, wherein Gordon Haskell was kindly shuffled off the roster to make room for a real singer, Yes’s own castrato sensation Jon Anderson. Funny enough, after several songs’ worth of passages go by, Gordon breaks back into the studio to sing for a bit before disappearing forever and ever, missing and presumed eaten by bears.

So I have written all of this to kind of give you a sense of the chaos that has unfolded in this album, but did you see that bit up there where I said I listened to it again and again? That’s because I completely love this album.

Seriously! Sure I may idolize strong melodies, and some of my very favorite songs can be played within a single octave on a piano, but something in my brain simply becomes obsessed when weirdness, the abstract, obtuse, endlessly and needlessly complex musical ideas come into play, and boy do they come in with this album.

Your average music listener, even one who otherwise enjoys King Crimson and their razor’s edge approach to pushing the envelope into the seat of their pants, will probably detest Lizard for any number of good reasons. It sounds out of tune, it hunkers down into rather long passages of go-nowhere note tinkling, hell, it sounds like Jazz in places, but the confusion and befuddlement is what keeps me coming back for more. The anticipation of another sequence of bewildering notes is a rush to me, and thanks to the amazing remastering job in the most recent re-release, the textures and tones really sing out in a good set of headphones. All 23 minutes of the album’s ending track keeps me thoroughly entertained, which turned out to be really good training for becoming an actual Yes fan, turns out.

I truly can’t knock this album for what it is, because it really shouldn’t have been, and I am so glad it was anyway. Apart from being musically one of the most interesting things I’ve heard, it’s also a rather clear window into a band that was falling apart before it even came together, and sure enough, only 1 member of the band remained to help Fripp through the next album, and it was the damn flute player.

Also, in true garage band fashion, when drummer Ian McCulloch left the group, he was immediately replaced with his ex-roommate, who could also play the drums. God bless King Crimson.

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David Bowie – The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars

I just realized, when selecting this album, that I just did a “concept album” yesterday. Still, unlike yesterday’s album, today’s is a little more loose, a lot more popular, and a lot of fun. Let’s talk about David Bowie’s album with that most cumbersome name: The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars:

It actually took me a very long time to get into David Bowie and his sound, particularly this, his most famous album. I guess, despite being raised by very musical parents (well my dad anyway), I was kept in the dark about some of the weirder acts, and David Bowie was considered weird by just about everyone in the day and ever since. Thus, having not heard his music because of the same factors that held me back from listening to the grand majority of what other people listened to, Bowie always had this mysterious property about him. I knew he was freaky, man, but how freaky?

Well, Bowie’s freakiness certainly proved to be a well-oiled machine, but what I wasn’t prepared for was just how good his music is. Though it took a lot of listens and some listening to the albums that surrounded it, I get where he’s coming from in Ziggy Stardust and now have quite a fondness for it (not to mention I was able to borrow a friend’s copy, whereas I only had the rental version from Zune previously which put a damper on things when I lost my subscription). Really, there’s a lot to be said for an album that begins with the end of the world.

The “concept” of the album is more or less represented in a few songs, but is not as relentless as, say, an album about displacement of an indigenous people in the expansion of the United States. In Ziggy Stardust, apparently the world is going to run out of resources and dry up and wither away in 5 years’ time (sound familiar?), and Ziggy is either an alien, a robot, an alien robot, a gay alien, a gay alien robot, or a skinny guy playing an androgynous feather duster playing a gay alien robot, sent here from Detroit to tell everyone to dig on peace and love or everyone’s going to die. Or something. I’ve only listened to this album maybe 10 times and read all the lyrics and the expansive Wikipedia article and talked to various people about it, so I have no clue as to what’s really going on here (the album’s pretty dense, you can interpret that however you wish). The first song is called “Five Years” and it’s actually a really moving number. Building on a drum beat that stays constant throughout, the song swells to a string-fueled frenzy with Bowie’s amazing vocals sticking around the very back of the mix telling the tale of one man’s reaction to the end of the world. It’s quite a mellow and beautiful song to start a rock album on, but it’s easily one of my favorites.

“Soul Love” keeps things mellow, and is kind of a deranged soul song where there’s the “oooh ahh” vocal backing and saxophones, but then the chorus comes in with its millions of chord changes, and then saxophones again, and who knows what’s going on here.

“Moonage Daydream” is an interesting song, as it’s apparently about Ziggy’s rise to stardom or something, but try to pry that out of these lyrics:

I’m an alligator, I’m a mama-papa coming for you
I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock ‘n’ rollin’ bitch for you
Keep your mouth shut
You’re squawking like a pink monkey bird
And I’m busting up my brains for the words

Like I said, the concepts in this album are a little more abstract. A friend pointed out that an interesting move in this song is how it starts with an abrupt, crunching guitar hit right before Bowie sings “I’m an alligator” and then the rest of the verse is all soft and acoustic. I think a more interesting move is where, at various points, the bass mimics the distinct backing vocal line and strays a little bit from the beat. This is why musicians are very boring people to talk to.

Ahh, “Starman”, what a song. I guess it’s about someone communicating with a gay alien who wants everyone to be groovy and for the “kids to boogie”. This song has a beautiful melody backed up by a very good string section. Since the song was included late in the album’s construction, it’s not actually about Ziggy Stardust but just a coincidental other story about an alien (turns out such a subject has a high probability of use in Bowie’s early catalog). Still, the story was switched around to be about someone hearing about Ziggy, who is still not actually an alien. I know, it’s confusing to me too.

Though the middle part of this album is pretty great, my favorites are actually in the back of the album (a sure-fire prevention of Late Album Slowdown). “Hang On To Yourself” is about as close to the “pop-punk” sound it helped spawn than I have ever heard, which is interesting given that acoustic guitar plays a role.

The “Ziggy Stardust” song is as straight-forward a song about the album’s title character as you can get with words like this:

Ziggy played for time, jiving us that we were voodoo
The kid was just crass, he was the nazz
With God given ass
He took it all too far but boy could he play guitar

Great stuff, I love how the vernacular of the 70′s used to be so weird to the old people back then, and is now weird to the young people of today. Either way, this song might as well be the most famous in the album for me because it was on the first Guitar Hero game.

Another song that has made the video game rounds (along with “Moonage Daydream”) was “Suffragette City”, which is by and far my favorite song on the album. It’s another song that wouldn’t be nearly as good if it weren’t for the weird vocabulary, but it’s about the catchiest song ever, so I’d forgive it if it were about the Devil wanting chocolate cake.

Finally, we get the dramatic slow-jam called “Rock N’ Roll Suicide”, which is about the decline of the rock star, and someone who is there to help him out. Unfortunately, it’s not about the actual genre of Rock N’ Roll committing suicide, because I’d personally really like to know when and how it died, as it happened long before I ever became aware of it.

Either way, as an album made by a guy playing a weirdo playing an alien, I’d say this is about as good as it gets. I’m still exploring Bowie’s discography to get a better grasp on his overall sound, and where this album fits in with it all, but until then, it stands alone as something of a favorite.

The Beatles – Let It Be

I didn’t really know what to title today’s entry, because in essence, I’m covering two version of the same album that are both titled differently, for today I’d like to cover a lot of ground in as few sleepy words as possible. Namely, today we’re talking about The Beatles’ “final” album, Let It Be:

We’ll also be talking about Let It Be… Naked, and I suppose this is the last entry about The Beatles, and if I had my way, I’d use the entirety of it to complain about Phil Spector.

This album was recorded just before The Beatles recorded their “actually final” album, Abbey Road, and released just after they broke up, so needles to say, this is an album with problems. In fact, in all fairness, I’d say the album wasn’t really finished until 2003, when Paul decided to fix the thing and released the Naked version.

Basically, after the “White Album” was finished, and despite the band’s insurmountable personal differences, Paul McCartney wanted to get the band back together, all recording in the same room, and make things nice and Beatley again, per chance to possibly tour again. These suggestions were met with looks of confusion and dismay from the other 3 members, so Paul chuckled and said “Just kidding!” about the touring, but the band members did think that recording another album wouldn’t be too hard a way to make millions, so they took him up on this and all got together.

In listening to the songs that wound up on the album, it’s quite evident that it’s Paul’s baby. He was the one to fight and keep the group together through this tough time (even though he reportedly was a little too excited and caused George Harrison to quit for a week), and some of his best work is on this album, I feel. In fact, when I think of the other late Beatles albums, I often paint McCartney as the idiot and Lennon as the guy making sense in how things should go, but I side with Paul in this recording. Not only for the reasons already stated, but because he absolutely hated what Phil Spector did to the album, and Lennon was the one responsible for that bastard ever getting ahold of the Beatles’ music.

Who knows why anybody likes Phil Spector, I recently watched 2 full documentaries on him and it made me hate him all the more, though it did give me an understanding of how he came to work with The Beatles. Apparently, Spector was busy being a recluse and locking his wife in his mansion from 1966 until 1970, all because one single to which he had applied his repulsive “Wall Of Sound” dared to peak at #88 on the Billboard chart. He was brought to England to work with John Lennon on his solo stuff, as John was a fan, which makes sense because Phil Spector was the “big thing” between Elvis and The Beatles for reasons that people speculate have to do with “no-one else being available at the time”.

Either way, after all the hundreds of songs got recorded for Let It Be (known as the “Get Back” sessions, because the whole concept of the album was McCartney wanting to “get back” to the band’s original way of doing things) were essentially shelved because nobody wanted to go through hundreds of songs’ worth of tapes and put together an album. Phil did, so he was given the job as producer of the already-recorded album, and while just finding the tapes, cutting them together, and calling it a day would have been just fine, of course he applied his terrible production standards all over it. It’s like drizzling honey over a priceless painting: yeah it’s pretty sweet but is it art?

I will admit, there are some things that Spector did to the album that were pretty good. For one, he took bits of dialogue and banter and spliced them in between songs, which gives the album a kind of good-natured vibe that keeps the thing from taking itself too seriously. Of course, when you realize that The Beatles were fighting all the time during the recording and had broken up by the time the album was released, that might have been a better idea to utilize about 10 albums ago. Admittedly, some of the string arrangements sound lovely, but that’s where I must segue into a short version of his huge list of crimes.

One example of something that could have been so right but went so wrong is the song “Across The Universe”. It’s a beautiful melody by Lennon, which is made even sweeter by acoustic guitar and sitar at some point (I think). Spector added in a lot of strings, which were too many strings playing too few notes, so it wasn’t that effective, but still sounded all right. Oh, but then he slowed the song down by lowering it half a step so that both the guitar and singer sound weird, then he applied an echoey sort of prickly effect on the acoustic guitar, then drowned the melody in reverb. I used to only half-like this song until I heard the Naked version, which is so much better, though I do kind of miss the strings.

McCartney was perfectly right to be furious about Phil Spector working his “magic” on this album, mainly because the album was McCartney’s idea, and his biggest obstacle in getting anything done was Lennon anyway, so who was Lennon to let Spector loose with all the tapes? Really, none of this would concern me as anything more than an amusing anecdote that happened to get turned into a whole album if not for one nagging notion: if this album would have been produced the right way, and with the right amount of care, it would easily be the Beatles’ best album.

See, I love me some Beatles, but there are two things, especially during their artistically meritable stage, that I will invariably put down about them when asked. For one, they were all great musicians (yes even Ringo), and for the most part they had brilliant ideas, but functioning as a band was something they could only do until they got too famous to need to be in a band anymore, then they just seemed to get in each others’ way all the time. For two, a lot of their most lauded albums are kind of a mess as far as cohesion goes, I always feel like I’m putting the album I started listening to on hold while some interloping song comes through, usually sung by Ringo, and then the show’s back on the road or has changed entirely.

In Let It Be (or, at least the …Naked version), the fact that all the members of the band are playing the parts at the same time with a minimal amount of overdubs at least lends the album the appearance that The Beatles are this amazing band that aren’t have any trouble at all, and it’s nearly a palpable feeling that makes me kind of sad for once that they didn’t continue on after this. The other aspect to the album is that, not just because it’s an album without a “Ringo” song on it, all the songs fit together so nicely that the album just flows from start to finish. Indeed, the …Naked re-mix of the album is a lot better than the official version, but I still feel like it’s more of an idea of how good the album could have been rather than being the end-all best Beatles album. At least it’s a lot smoother than the Spector-produced version. In that version, the inclusion of an unfinished song (“Maggie Mae”) and a bizarre excerpt from a meaningless jam (“Dig It”) trip things up, with the former ending too abruptly and the latter sounding more like Mick Jagger had infiltrated the studio as he’s known to do. Not the most cohesive thing ever, for sure.

Either way, no matter which version of the album you prefer, Let It Be has some incredible songs in it, and it’s occasionally well put together. This is, of course, the part where I point out that it’s a little ironic that an album called Let It Be has received the opposite treatment. Indeed, the album was shelved for a long time, but instead of letting it be, they tried something like three times to get an album out of the tapes, and then Phil Spector got involved, and then McCartney got angry, but couldn’t let it be until 33 years later, when the …Naked version came out, and indeed one could “let it be” at that point, but then the original Spector-produced version came out as a remixed album which does sound better but still… let it be.

Neil Young – Time Fades Away

In yesterday’s entry, I described my favorite band as being really original and really insular, and I fully believe that the two are often connected with great artists. Well, there aren’t many artists out there as original and insular as Neil Young, so I figured we’d give his stuff one more shot before the year’s out.

Though I could go on about one of his really popular albums, the center of my own enjoyment of the man has been his infamous “Ditch Trilogy”, and since the only other Neil Young content on this blog have been 2 of the 3 albums in that trilogy, I figure logically I should talk about his impossible-to-find album, Time Fades Away:

Like with yesterday’s album, I’m not kidding when I say this one is hard to find. The LP has been out of print for longer than I’ve been alive, and it was never released in any other format. The reason? Neil didn’t like the sound quality apparently. Of course, the actual performances captured in this live disc are wrought with uncertainty, nervousness, raw energy, and a very raw sound, even moreso than the second Ditch album, Tonight’s The Night.

There’s a good reason for that; if you know anything about the Ditch Trilogy, they were the trio of albums that came out after Neil had recorded the greatest album of his career, success-wise. In preparing for a harrowing 60+ show tour to promote Harvest, which would eventually be considered the “Greatest Canadian album ever”, Neil was having problems with his guitarist, the talented Danny Whitten, who had grown a little too attached to heroin, like one does. Indeed, one of Young’s previous songs, “The Needle And The Damage Done”, was written partly about Danny’s addiction (though it mainly encompassed what Young saw as a more widespread problem among musicians).

Well, one thing led to another and, early on in the rehearsal stage of the tour, Neil had no choice but to have Danny sit this tour out, presumably until he could remember how to play songs. Danny took it like a man, cleaned up his act, and lived happily ever after… oh, wait, no he didn’t, he overdosed on heroin and died.

So needles to say, Neil was pretty dang low about this series of events, and at some point preceding the tour, decided to do something a little wacky: play the dates on his tour using only newer material that nobody had done before, ignore the hits, and quietly lose his tiny mind.

Thus, that is the context in which Time Fades Away was recorded. Neil’s voice was not performing as well as he liked, so a few songs are peppered with performances by CSNY members Crosby and Nash, who provide some rhythm guitar work too. Other than that, Neil toured with a band he dubbed the “Stray Gators”, made up of musicians I am not even going to name because they seemed to be as confused as I am as to who they were and whether they actually played in this band. I will say that the temperamental pianist for the group was Jack Nitzsche, who among other things, was one of the key players in developing Phil Spector’s reviled “Wall Of Sound”, and is thus on the level of Himler in my mind.

Anyway, despite the unstable Neil Young, his unstable band, the unstable recording process by which the album was recorded, and the unstable audience who were simultaneously confused and angered by Young’s refusal to step in line with all good sense, this album is amazing, if not a bit… well you probably know.

It starts off with a bouncy song called, appropriately enough, “Time Fades Away”. There’s something to be said about a song that starts with the line “14 junkies too week to work, one sells diamonds for what they’re worth”, clearly Neil ain’t playing around. This song is easily the catchiest in the set, and makes some indictments on the immoral, nameless set of characters in each verse, ending each one with the chorus:

Son, don’t be home too late
Try to get back by 8
Son, don’t wait ’til the break of day
’cause you know how time fades away

I kind of love it, it’s like parents warning their children, only instead of stopping at junkies, there’s also “all day presidents” which seems to represent governmental corruption, and something about the subways in Canada, I don’t know. Either way, the tune of the song is one of my favorites of Neil’s.

The next song is one of three songs on the album that is just Neil on a piano, singing an amazing song. It’s interesting that a live recording should have 3 “solo” performances and have that be nearly half the album, but Neil has never been in a mood to care about such conventions. This one, “Journey To The Past”, shares a title with a film that Neil did with a soundtrack that was also never released on CD (rightfully so, I have heard). It’s a really good song, and like much of this album, is such an honest set of lyrics that you’d swear they were auto-biographical, I don’t know enough about Neil to confirm whether they are. The other two songs that feature Neil on piano by himself are “Love In Mind”, and “The Bridge”, the last of which is my favorite, despite being the most abstract of the three, or perhaps because of it!

“Yonder Stands The Sinner” and “L.A.” are really jammy jam songs that seem to have a very accusatory tone, the first seeming to be about the singer running away from someone calling him “Sinner”, and calling his name “without making a sound”. Of course, my natural instinct is to assume this song is about the conscience. “L.A.” seems to be about the second coming of Christ, or that time that everyone from that area keep talking about where California is inevitably going to slide into the ocean (see also: “Desperadoes Under The Eaves” on Warren Zevon). In fact, “Love In Mind” seems to be another guilt-ridden track about the conscience. I’m sure that these songs must represent, in that fantastically subtle way, guild that Neil was feeling toward other events that predate this album.

“Don’t Be Denied” tells the story of a boy who grew up in an abusive school and ended up learning music and moving to L.A. to play music with his friend and selling his “golden sound”. Lyrically, it’s my favorite song on the album, as it tells a really clear story and no matter what the truth is, I fully believe it to be Neil’s story. This is one of those  songs that will tell you why Neil is so loved and revered by everybody, and more importantly, why he can do whatever the heck he wants with music and it will still be important to somebody.

The song ends with a really catchy tune seemingly dedicated to the ones who must work day jobs in lieu of “making it” (hello!), and musically it really speaks to me. I don’t know, I just love jam songs when done effectively. This one is one of those ones, for sure.

So yes, Time Fades Away is a great album, but I can see why Neil never wanted anything to do with it after it was released. It’s an album that captures a moment that Neil has moved on from, and the sound and performance quality is such that releasing it would only please his established fans, which would go against what Neil was doing when he decided to tour stadiums with songs his fans weren’t expecting. It seems illogical to please your fans by releasing an album of a time where you were against pleasing your fans, unless there’s some great financial gain to be seen from it, and there isn’t, and anyway Neil Young doesn’t have to care about all that. This album has purposely been lost to time, and indeed, though this music still shines as bright as it ever did, time fades away.

The Rolling Stones – It’s Only Rock N’ Roll

Seeing as how I have been a little lax in covering The Rolling Stones in this here blog, I’m met here toward the end of it with many albums to choose from. I considered many today but ultimately decided to go with one that I really love called It’s Only Rock N’ Roll, and not just because Exile On Main Street would have been too long to listen to on such short notice either:

The Rolling Stones, in or around ’74, were making a lot of changes with the way they did things for a while. Of course, a lot of things had already happened since their original inception, but most notably with this recording, it would be the last album to feature guitarist Mick Taylor (who had replaced Brian Jones, whose last album was Let It Bleed), and the first to feature Ronnie Wood, who is still with the band. This is also the second album to be self-produced by the Stones (the first being Their Satanic Majesties Request), which is something the Stones would go with for the rest of their careers.

Another thing I noticed about this album, moreso than any that predate it (though elements have been there all along), is that it’s fairly hard on women. Indeed, songs like “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” had some fairly up-to-date and appropriately manly opinions on women, but a lot of It’s Only Rock N’ Roll is downright bitter and scornful. I’m not saying I don’t dig it, Rock N’ Roll, to me, is inherently sexist (“What’s wrong with being sexy?”), which probably explains why so many women suck at it. I have decided to call this phenomenon the “Bill Haley Curse”. Anyway, this album is ripe with it, almost darkly so.

In fact, one of the better examples (without getting too dark) is the opening track, “If You Can’t Rock Me”. Mick Jagger sings the song with such passion and energy (or he’s just throwing up, it’s hard to tell sometimes) that you really can’t understand the words. Well, here are some of them:

The band’s on stage and it’s one of those nights, oh yeah
The drummer thinks that he is dynamite, oh yeah
You lovely ladies in your leather and lace
A thousand lips I would love to taste
I’ve got one heart and it hurts like hell
If you can’t rock me somebody will

Which is all innocent enough, but then he starts going on about black girls with blue hair and hookers and wedding cakes and things just get freaky. I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is an awesome song.

The band then launches into a Temptations cover, because that’s the kind of thing you do, right? Only, instead of one of their classics, whose names elude me at the moment, we get a song that practically defines the word
“obsequious” called “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg”. Now, this song may seem like it’s deflating my previous claims that the album is against women, but really it works in the theme of the album because it demonstrates an inability to work out differences by any other way than begging and pleading. If that’s not a good enough explanation then look over there!

Wow, that was awesome!

Anyway, the next song brings us right back on course with one of my favorite songs in the Stones’ catalog: “It’s Only Rock N’ Roll (But I Like It)“. It’s really easy, especially if you’ve seen the band in concert, to confuse this song for a mind-numbing party song, but there seems to be a dichotomy between the verses and the choruses that may get lost in the mix of guitars that Mick Jagger doesn’t seem interested in singing over:

If I could stick a knife in my heart
Suicide right on stage
Would it be enough for your teenage lust
Would it help to ease the pain? Ease your brain?

If I could dig down deep in my heart
Feelings would flood on the page
Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya
Would ya think the boy’s insane? He’s insane

I said I know it’s only rock ‘n roll but I like it

The verses give a lot of insight into the singer’s feelings about what he’s doing. There’s no real love for the audience of women for which he’s pouring his heart out (he states earlier “Would that be enough for your cheating heart?”) and the bridge even states “I bet that you think you’re the only woman in town”, but the music compels him to bleed himself onto the stage, and to stab his heart with a pen, which makes it almost seem like he’s a slave to this passion for performance. Yet, in the actual chorus, there’s almost an existential acceptance that, at the end of the day, it’s only rock n’ roll. To wrap up a thing that has control over someone’s life on such a level into such a phrase is deeper than I think even the author intended. Maybe I’m just thinking too much of it.

“Till The Next Time We Say Goodbye” is a ballad that I would normally pass off as “just another ballad”, but I just love the way this one just refuses to take the woman who keeps leaving the singer at all seriously. It’s a song that really says nothing more than “When you’re done crying, I’ll be over there”. The only other thing to really say about this song is that he says “Wine” and the pronunciation cracks me up every time. Wonderful!

“Time Waits For No-One” is another pretty great track, this time about the singer accepting aging and death, which is kind of funny because it’s 35 years later and he’s still aging.

“Luxury” apparently takes a page from reggae, but I don’t really hear it. It’s about working hard so that the singer’s wife can live in luxury, which goes well with that misogyny thing.

“Dance Little Sister” is a catchy number (especially for the slightly off-kilter rhythm) that is only really significant because it taught me a new word: “bacchanal”, which is an adjective describing drunken debauchery, and I just love learning words like that.

After another ballad and another bought of misogyny (“Short And Curlies”), we get an interesting ending to the album. It’s called “Fingerprint File” and it’s funky as hell. It’s also about “Big Brother” and government surveillance, which you might be able to tell through Mick’s unusual singing for this particular track, wherein he leaves out entire words if the lyric notes are to be believed. There’s also a jive-tastic spoken interlude half way through. It’s a pretty easy song to miss, being placed in the very back of the album, but even that makes it seem like they’re trying to hide the song from “Them”.

Either way, despite the rampant anti-femnism (or perhaps because of it), this album is what I’d consider a true classic Rock N’ Roll album. It’s frequently forgotten, usually passed over for things like Exile On Main Street, which is mainly why I felt compelled to pass the latter over for this album. I know it’s only a music blog, but I like it.

King Crimson – Red

Today’s been a hectic day for me, as I am in the process of moving back to Austin after a relatively unsuccessful “break” here in my hometown. It’ll be nice to get back to business, but the whole packing and loading trucks thing has caused undue delay in today’s album writing. I will say, at least, that I knew what I was going to write about at least since yesterday. I really wanted to give King Crimson another shot, and in keeping with my seemingly chaotic treatment of their chronology, am going to talk about their “final” album before first breaking up in 1974. So here we go, here’s King Crimson’s aptly-named Red:

I have been listening to King Crimson for a while now, and I really only feel like I barely know them. I don’t know, maybe because there’s just so much to know (one could easier learn French than recall all of the personnel shifts this band went through), and also because the music is still a little bit over my head. Even though the Red album is centered around the band being a “trio” (plus 1 or 5 other musicians at various points), some of this stuff is so confusing that I have to listen to it about 5 times through just to get this far into the writeup.

Last we left the band (chronologically), they had just put out one of their best works, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, featuring some brilliant musicianship, thanks in no small part to the fantastic lineup they had going for them in the aftermath of pretty much everyone in the band but Robert Fripp circa the Islands album being eaten by bears.

Alas, the lineup of guitarist/fearless leader Robert Fripp, bassist/vocalist John Wetton, drummer extraordinaire Bill Bruford, stay-at-home lyricist Richard Palmer-James, and red-shirt cadets Jamie Muir and David Cross (no relation to the comedian) would start to dwindle after the Larks’ Tongues experience. First, Jamie Muir would have some kind of mental problem and wind up leaving the band unexpectedly to a nearby bear-filled forest, and after an album weirdly called Starless And Bible Black, violinist David Cross apparently got voted off the team for reasons Wikipedia seem hesitant to go into. I’d say it was probably to save the young man’s life from all these wild animals running rampant.

When the time came to make a new album, the remaining three members weren’t exactly in the best shape. Fripp had gone all spiritual and was under the impression that the world was about to end (what he might have been actually seeing was the decline of Prog Rock around 1978), and was at odds with Bruford and Wetton, who were rocking out too hard on stage, a cardinal sin in the Prog world, seemingly.

Now, while this may sound slightly similar to a story reported on yesterday, the decline of King Crimson was actually not necessarily a bad thing, because Red is a fantastic album. Instead of two albums’ worth of half-nonsense, the entire album is contained within 5 tracks, all of which contain some of the best elements of the Crimson sound up to that point, without so much of that pesky avant-garde filler that would sometimes take up entire albums (see: Lizard). This could be said to be influenced somewhat by Fripp’s lack of asserting control over the whole thing, leaving a lot of the production work to Bruford and Wetton, who just shrugged and proceeded made the thing rock.

It starts out with an aptly-named instrumental called “Red”, which uses a “whole-tone scale”, a scale so secret that I dare not try and describe it to you. Basically, it sounds a little bit like a standard song, if that song was right around the corner waiting to kill you. Yeah, the song has this crazy dissonance to it that kind of gives it a creepy effect, but various changes in the structure put things back in the proper “rock” category, and then of course there’s a section for cellos, possibly included to signal the approach of wild bears.

“Fallen Angel” brings up the end of the album’s first half, and is the first song on the album to feature lyrics. These lyrics are pretty dire, about the death of the singer’s little brother who tried to follow in the singer’s footsteps (or motorcycle tracks, as apparently the “Angel” is meant to mean the “Hell’s Angels”). Moreso than the death of an idiot, what might bring a tear to your eye about this song is that it’s the final one to include the poor acoustic guitar, as Fripp would eventually burn all of his acoustic guitars and only use electric ones from there on out. What’s next, burning all the mellotrons too?

The album’s centerpiece is another song that sounds like it wants to murder you, this one going by the name of “One More Red Nightmare”. Still, this song is immensly fun, with a very strong vocal performance from Wetton, and some of the catchier drum sounds to come out of Bruford in this period, at least in my ears.

The next song is “Providence”, named after the Rhode Island town in which the song was performed (mostly via improvisation) live. This song features David Cross’ violin opening the thing before it starts to go off into this “little bits of instruments coming in and playing random noise” series of tangents that could sound like a brilliant piece of musical art, but most days of the week winds up sounding a bit like a “shreds video“. Really though, I do like the song, especially when the beat comes in and the whole thing sort of comes together.

Then finally, we get a song “Starless”, which might confuse some people since it contains the lyric “Starless and Bible black”, which is the name of the previous album, which has a song with the same title. I’m still not quite clear on this one myself, apparently they wrote the song for the previous album, but scrapped it in favor of a 9 minute instrumental that’s still pretty good, and then decided to put the song on their next album in its full form? Either way, this song is my favorite vocal melody of all 3 songs on this album that contain vocals, and the inclusion of some of the Islands players give this song a very “original King Crimson” sound, which is always a good sound to have.

Of course, this extremely strong set of songs wasn’t enough to hold the band together. If anything, this album’s greatness was just a coincidence. Fripp wound up disbanding the King Crimson before this album was even released, and famously remarked that the band was “completely over for ever and ever.” It turns out that “for ever and ever” is more like a few years, as the band would bounce back with an all new sound and cast in the 80′s, but we’ll have to get into that another day. Until then!

David Bowie – Aladdin Sane

I really wanted to represent David Bowie somewhere on this weblog at some point, because the guy is just so damn cool. Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a newcomer to his sound, and I don’t actually have (though I have heard) his Ziggy Stardust album. I do, however, have his so-called “sequel” album to that, Aladdin Sane, so I guess we’d better talk about it then:

Really, I probably should have picked a more popular Bowie album to heap praises upon, but I haven’t heard anything from the man I haven’t liked yet, and this album is no exception. It’s the direct follow-up to Ziggy Stardust, and has been treated as a “sequel” by people who like to use the word “sequel” when it comes to albums. The actual writing of the songs that weren’t already written by The Rolling Stones were written while Bowie was on tour promoting his hugely popular previous album.

Having just started reading about this album, it seems that critics can’t seem to make anything of it. Some think it’s half terrible, and others think it’s half brilliant. Personally, I don’t know enough about David Bowie to hate any of this album. I think the songs themselves are really great, and who knows maybe there’s some “derivative” work here, I’m too busy enjoying the whole thing to care. So, as opposed to being “fair” or “critical” of this album, which really isn’t my style anyway, I’ll tell you what I like about it.

The album caught my attention immediately when I blasted “Watch That Man”, because I had to check my Winamp, thinking “Oh sorry that’s The Rolling Stones”. Turns out I’m wrong! It’s a guitar and piano blues-rock fest much in the style of something the Stones would have done (indeed Bowie was something at least one of the Stones has done ooooooh that’s freaky). Indeed, the voice is unmistakably Bowie, unmistakably buried underneath the mix, and I was quite confused by this, so I checked Wikipedia and it turns out they agree with me on both counts. Well, Bowie or Stones, I love this kind of music, I don’t care who’s making it.

I will say, however, that the second track is where the album really comes alive for me. The title track  had me thinking one thing and one thing alone: “Holy crap what a piano solo!” As it turns out, this is the most cliché thing I could have possibly thought to myself about this song, as Bowie reportedly has never gone a week without being asked about the piano solo on this particular song. It has to be heard to be believed, folks. Basically, it’s the most messed up, musically complex to the point of seeming random piece of piano work I’ve ever heard, and I’m a Gentle Giant fan, kids. It sounds basically like a cat chasing a helicopter around the keyboard. The rest of the song is awesome too, but really this is one of those stand-out piano tracks. Just… try to refrain from asking Bowie himself about it, he’s probably sick of that now.

Similarly, “Time” is a track that heavily leans on piano, recalling a kind of rag-time era sound, only more bizarre and manic. As if that wasn’t enough, there are dual guitars, which is always fun. This song isn’t the only use of old-timey sounds either, “Drive-In Saturday” recalls a kind of doo-wop sound if it were done in the year 2000 (the future) with the sounds of lasers and flying cars like what we have. It’s also about people learning how to have sex from pornography, which is pretty cool I guess!

Speaking of The Rolling Stones and piano and lasers, those are about the only 3 words I can legally use to describe Bowie’s cover of “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, but at the risk of legal prosecution, I will also say that this cover is way better than the original at least by virtue of being way faster and Bowie-tastic.

One song that really resonated well with me is the final track, “Lady Grinning Soul”. When I think about what the words “avant-garde” mean to me, I often come up with the wrong definition, but the music I picture is a lot like this tune. It’s an ultra-smooth minor-key tune with echoey vocals, excellent instrumentation bringing in horns and really fancy piano (seriously this may be one of my favorite “piano” albums ever) against an acoustic guitar and delicate bass-line. The melody is to die for, and though people say things like “James Bond” when they mention the melody, I don’t really hear it, but I’m not a big Bond fan I guess.

Oh, and before I forget, there is another song that also struck quite a chord with me, the Bo-Diddley-beat-driven “Panic In Detroit” (have I ever mentioned how much I love the Diddley beat?) The song has a great vocal melody (albeit pushed way in the background again), and a great use of the legendary bomp-bomp-bomp … bomp-bomp beat, but the real star of the show is the amazing guitar solo that eats its way into the song in the last minute. It’s not that it’s a technically proficient guitar solo (it’s basically noise), but that noise is just beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful noise, the song that appears right after that, “Cracked Actor”, is kind of a mess. I do enjoy the song, but yeah guitar feedback kind of crowds the foreground at various points, and harmonica (which can easily be mistaken for more guitar feedback) fills things up as well. I like the song, all right, it’s just one that you may have to turn down for Grandma, is all I’m saying, especially since it’s all about prostitutes, and your Grandma would probably not want to be reminded of her past.

Anyway, that’s all but a couple of songs, but those songs are good too. Again, I’m finding it really hard to say anything overtly negative about this album. About the worst that anyone can come up with is that it’s not Ziggy Stardust and really, there are many worse albums by many worse artists that hold that same distinction.

So, until next time!

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!

Gentle Giant – Giant For A Day!

Oh man, it’s finally arrived, the day I’ve been dreading, the day that I, in taking on the task of talking about every Gentle Giant album, have seen as an inevitability since the beginning. Yes, this is the day we’re going to talk about Giant For A Day!

This album is about as infamous as you can get when talking about a band as famously non-famous “prog” rockers Gentle Giant. The cover just about says it all: the Giant, an insignia of the band’s since day one, when it graced the front of their first album, is now a paper-cut-out cartoon version of itself with the insane idea of taking a pair of scissors to this album you would have paid good money for, and putting it on your own face, presumably in order to show up to one of the band’s shows with the mask on to give everyone a laugh. Heck, U2 just did something like that in a concert I went to this year, but there’s a difference between U2 this year and Gentle Giant in 1978, only one of those bands actually played shows.

Yes, Gentle Giant only played 1 show in the entirety of 1978. A band that toured relentlessly with like 90 instruments being played between 5 guys that was actually starting to see a bit of success (as can be heard in the live album Playing The Fool), decided that, after consistent record company pressure to churn out some pop hits that date all the way back to The Power And The Glory, to take a bit of a break.

Having already tested the waters of their new-found pop sound with The Missing Piece, Gentle Giant seemed to forget one very important step when it comes to writing and recording new, completely different material: actually playing that material for people to see if it was successful. The result of such a lack of experimentation meant throwing out a new product before it was anywhere close to stable and strong enough to stand on its own.

Still, when one looks at the type of music Gentle Giant was blumped into, and the other bands that were around at the time, 1978 was simply not a good year for progressive rock. King Crimson were nowhere to be found, having split up 4 years previous, Yes (a band I have yet to get into) had released Tormato, another album where the prog formula was shortened to pop songs, and despite the album going platinum (Yes were a much more successful group than Gentle Giant), was still their lowest-charting album of the 70′s. Genesis had released …And Then There Were Three, another musical shift from bad avant-garde to worse pop, but despite the album being (reportedly) terrible, it was the band’s first platinum seller and it even spawned their first U.S. radio hit.

When one looks at the apparent death of Progressive rock, and the bands that had shifted to a more crappy sound seeing success, even resounding success, and looking at the other sounds that were around (disco being the biggest offender), is it any wonder that a band who only seen glimpses of that success when the bands that used to open for them like Yes and Genesis, would want to try and replicate it? Sure, Gentle Giant denounced their intention to be “commercial” all the way back in the liner notes of Acquiring The Taste, but since they had spent nearly a decade now failing to acquire enough money to succeed, clearly their tastes had to change.

Oh, the boys gave it their best shot, but there were some problems. For one, Gentle Giant, by prog standards, were far more advanced in terms of complexity and arrangement than most, and without a shred of ego among them. This meant that, in shifting to pop, which is all ego and the arrangements all come out of a cookie cutter, meant that the band was having to write against their most obvious weakness: paying attention to what’s popular.

Really, to listen to the album with “let’s write some pop songs” in mind, you kind of see that, instead of carefully shifting their established sound to something that would appeal to a wider audience,  the guys decided to just turn completely away from their original sound and shot-gun blast every genre they could think of that was selling, and try to represent it in the same album. The result is an album that could have used a lot more of that good old-fashioned arrangement and care that they so effortlessly seemed to be able to put into an album, even a two-week rush-job like Interview.

Overall, the styles they chose to go for are mostly sparkly, positive-minded and completely toothless bubble gum pop, or as close as a band of this caliber could get to it without frontal lobotomies. The first example of this new type of sound is “Words From The Wise“, of which they were nice enough to make a music video (indeed, this would be an album that would see 3 extremely low-budget videos, further proving the band’s intentions).

Indeed, like with the shrill guitar riff of “Two Weeks In Spain” that opens up The Missing Piece, the 4-part vocal acapella harmony of “Words From The Wise” should jolt you into an upright position, finger extended to push the STOP button as soon as possible. Still, to stick with the song, one is rewarded with an earnest effort to recreate the sounds of… oh who am I kidding, the song sounds like a damn Mentos commercial. Still, the song is well constructed, and the timing of the vocals and instrumentation throughout is at least complex enough to keep one’s attention beyond the crazy in-the-front-row vocals. The song’s bridge has some really crazy effect coloring Kerry Minnear’s vocals, and I kind of wish they would have explored that a little more, but what can you expect in a 4 minute song when you have 21 repetitions of the one-line hook to get through (that’s not exaggeration, I sat here and counted)?

The next song is an abrupt shift, going from the glittery pop (which I just accidentally wrote as “poop” and almost left that way on purpose) to this kind of Southern Rock-sounding acoustic number called “Thank You“. Now, “acoustic numbers”, when it comes to Gentle Giant, used to carry with them a great deal of excitement, because the dual guitar parts constructed by Gary Green and Ray Shulman are usually a thing of wonder to behold. In this case, such excitement is replaced with torpor, as the duo’s usual fancy picking is replaced with loudly, almost clumsily, strummed open chords and nothing else. Gary comes back in with some modest electric guitar to counter-act Derek Shulman’s really weird vocals on this song. I don’t know what it is, but it seems like the recording process with which the group got Derek’s vocal for this song left him without any consonants. I’ve heard demo tapes with better-produced vocals than this, and yet it all seems so intentional, like the band was trying to sound “rootsy” or something, but with a tune so cheesy that it makes Boston blush. Despite that, this is one of the stronger songs on the album, and was actually co-written by the band’s drummer (which is how you know you’re in trouble, see also The Beatles, Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma).

The third track is, in my opinion, the best on the album. It’s the title track, and despite not sounding anywhere near what Gentle Giant had ever produced, even in this album so far, is one of the most conventionally “catchy” tunes they’ve produced. I’m honestly not sure how to describe the sound using words that apply to any other song that was produced at this time, there’s a lot of Queen-like dual electric guitars which more or less form the hook, and the beat and “computer sounds” keyboard part by Kerry is something you could have gotten off a Devo album (or a Weird Al song that parodies Devo). Interestingly, despite this song predating Weird Al’s hit by 7 years, Derek seems to be taking a cue from the comedian in his vocal stylings here. Why would a guy choose, at no discernible benefit to the actual song, decide to do his singing in a ridiculous, foreign-sounding accent? I have no idea, but it’s still a song that I enjoy listening to, even on days when I’m incapable of enjoying the rest of the album. It also has the closest thing to a conventional music video the band has made, so enjoy!

Next, we have yet another mysterious shift in genres. Inexplicably, “Spookie Boogie” is an instrumental in the form of a cartoony Halloween party song. It features some tonal complexity, and a xylophone part that may recall some of the Giants’ early days, but none of that changes what the song is. I have no idea why the band included this song on the album, were they really hoping to get into that demographic that really enjoys instrumental “spooky” songs that are every bit as spooky as an episode of Scooby Doo? Maybe the band had the wrong idea of the meaning of the word “boogie”, taking the “boogie-man” definition instead of the type of music, since this song certainly isn’t a “boogie” by any musical sense of the word. Either way, I have read reviews that have called this the “best song on the album”, so that probably gives you some idea of the level of quality at which most people put this album.

“Take Me” is a bit more of a boogie, and actually a pretty good song. I have often though about Giant For A Day! as something of a Gentle Giant children’s album, because of the simplicity of the tunes and the all-too colorful and bright tone compared to something like Acquiring The Taste. This song disproves that theory soundly, as it’s one of the more “adult” songs by the band, taking a complex approach to the subject of relationships, at least as much as one can in a song primarily composed of heavy-handed choruses in 3 1/2 minutes:

Smooth-talkin’, slow-walkin’ tell no lie
Cool is the fool with the eagle eye
Spending my time drunk and living fast
Nobody knows what lies in my past.
I’m lookin’ back, my life is cryin’ out
What did I do, what was I all about?

Oh, take me
Save me from my misery
Oh, take me
I want to be free
Oh, take me
Take my hand and help me on
Oh, take me
I will soon be gone

Not too bad, really. It’s definitely on the same level as previous efforts to croon about relationships that Derek has made, and certainly as good as something like “I’m Turning Around”. I still say Phil did it better, but yeah.

Next we have another musical direction for the band to take, this time back into Southern America for a very Lynyrd Skynyrd-like blues-rock style, complete with the same guitar riffs you’d hear all throughout the 70′s. Derek tries his best, God bless him, to destroy his voice hitting some fairly annoying high notes, and Kerry might have been slightly cursing the single-chord bang on the piano part that he was given (or gave himself, who knows). This song is a bit of a train-wreck, and doesn’t even have an interesting title, “Little Brown Bag” indeed.

“Friends” is another unique step in the entire Gentle Giant catalog. It’s a simple acoustic guitar number, entirely written and sung by John Weathers, the drummer. Again, you know you’re in trouble when you let the drummer write and sing songs, but you’re in even worse trouble with the song your drummer sings is one of the best on the album. Indeed, it’s hard to deny the warmth and sincerity of “Friends”, and despite it being the simplest song Gentle Giant has ever recorded, musically speaking, it actually evokes the humble good nature of the band better than anything else on this album.

Indeed, it’s about the opposite of “No Stranger”, which puts the band into a kind of Motown mode, only if Motown was being played by 5 English nerds who can play better songs than this simply by tuning their instruments. Yeah, I kind of hate “No Stranger”, and not only for the stale tune, but because he rhymes “stranger” with “danger”, and I know it may just be modern-day cynicism saying this, but screw that.

Next up is a song that was clearly written with the intention of drawing tears from the eyes of the listener, but to hear the opening guitar whine on “It’s Only Goodbye” is far more likely to draw those tears out from laughter. Indeed, “It’s Only Goodbye” is about as obligatory as you get, as it’s a piano-driven 4 minute power ballad with Gary Green doing his best to strangle his Les Paul as it makes rather convincingly the sound of a cat giving birth. I would love to applaud the mature lyrics or catchy tune in this song, but my hands are too busy holding my gut as I laugh this song away. It’s worth hearing, it really is.

Finally, we have one more foray into piano-based bluesy Southern-rock nonsense with “Rock Climber”, a play on the word “rock” as a musical genre rather than a mountain for someone to climb. The song is a bit catchy, despite the pile-driving vocals, but it’s already too late. There was no saving this album ever since the first notes were sung.

So, as it goes, the band’s attempt to stay afloat by capitalizing on a very obvious shift in music was a well-meaning one, but unfortunately would not succeed. The band lost a lot of fans over Giant For A Day!, and to nobody’s surprise but their own, didn’t gain any new ones either.

Still, the album is not a total failure, it’s actually a fairly interesting case study when one looks at how a musically accomplished yet culturally detached band like Gentle Giant approached the idea of trying to write popular music. It’s like if Johnny Cash were to try rap or Genesis to try heterosexuality. While I could make the case that, like Acquiring The Taste is the ultimate “night-time” album in Gentle Giant’s catalog, Giant For A Day! is the ultimate “day-time” album, I don’t feel compelled to compare Giant For A Day! to the band’s other accomplishments in that way. Instead, I believe that the album is the opposite of Acquiring The Taste in that it completely goes against the Gentle Giant mission statement that they made back in ’71:

“It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being very unpopular… From the outset we have abandoned all preconceived thoughts of blatant commercialism. Instead we hope to give you something far more substantial and fulfilling.”

Of course, the band themselves would ultimately realize this fact and subsequently break up, but not before giving us one more album, which has a few surprises of its own. We’ll be talking about that album in December, not only because that’s the mission statement *I* put forth in January, but because it was a freaking expensive album to obtain. Until then, Happy Gentle Giant (for a) Day!

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.