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- Parliament "Chocolate City" 1975 (USA)
- P-Funk
was really two bands in one; after George Clinton's first group
The Parliaments "broke up", he reincorporated the group as Funkadelic
and signed a contract with Westbound records. Then Parliament
"reformed" (with literally the exact same musicians who were also
Funkadelic) and signed to Motown offshoot Invictus in 1970, before
adding James Brown's horn section and Bootsy Collins on bass and
re-signing to Casablanca in 1974, all while Funkadelic continued to
make records for the Warner Bros label! Originally the idea was
that Parliament was the hooky, horn-driven "pop" group while Funkadelic
would remain the heavy psychedelic group, although by 1976 they were
regularly touring as "The Parliament Funkadelic" and freely intermixing
songs from both groups' albums. This week's CAOTW is the third
long player credited to Parliament, one of many immortal albums from
the 1970's by "America's greatest band" -- if anything the title
track celebrating trends in urban demographics is more relevant today
than ever.
- Here's several clips of P-Funk in their 1970's heyday: "Mothership Connection" which explains the mythology of the funk, "Dr. Funkenstein" on which George Clinton invents "rapping", as well as the monster jam "Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)" and the guitar showcase "Cosmic Slop". Plus here's James Brown live in 1971: "Ain't It Funky Now"
featuring Bootsy Collins on bass (there's a good close up of him --
without shades! -- around 3:30 into the clip.) And here's Jimi Hendrix, the original psychedelic afronaut, playing "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)",
the song on which he invented the funky wah-wah style of rhythm guitar,
which was also later a posthumous #1 hit single in the UK. And
finally here's a rare clip of P-Funk's virtuoso guitar shredder Eddie "Maggot Brain" Hazel.
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- The Who "Live At Leeds" 1970 (UK)
- The
Who's 1970 live album is considered by many to be among the finest live
rock albums of all time, and also one of The Who's most thrilling
records. The group certainly made plenty of outstanding
recordings, but it was on the concert stage that they were truly
unrivaled. Though they jammed as much as the Grateful Dead, The
Who did so with incredible percision and drama, and never sank into
dull noodling or epic drum solos. The telepathic interplay
between the three instrumentalists in the band has probably never been
equaled.
- Here's the famous TV appearance where they played "My Generation"
on the Smothers Brothers show, and Keith permanently damaged Pete's
hearing by loading too many explosives into his drum kit!
Here's a documentary clip with Pete Townshend interviews & the "Underture" from Tommy played at Woodstock.
And here's a classic blues cover they often performed live (but never recorded in the studio), "Young Man Blues".
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- The Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour" 1967 (UK)
- Today is Sir Paul McCartney's birthday (and it's my birthday too yeah!) So the CAOTW this week is my all-time favorite Beatles record. Magical Mystery Tour
was originally a British TV special which received dreadful reviews
when it aired during Christmas 1967, but the accompanying 6-song
soundtrack EP was an instant classic in the psychedelic style of the
times. Their American record company then added five recent
non-LP single sides to create this full-length album for the US market
(the TV show eventually made it to America in 1976, the same year
this LP configuration was released in Britain.) How could a
Beatles album that contains "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Penny Lane"
and "I Am The Walrus" NOT be
the greatest Beatle record of all time? Plus "Fool On The Hill",
"Baby You're A Rich Man", "All You Need Is Love" -- it's positively
crammed with hits!
- Here's a clip of silly outtakes from the promo film for "Hello Goodbye", a #1 hit single on this album which is Paul's statement about duality
(cause he's a Gemini dontcha know.) And here's another amazing Paul-penned #1 hit also included on this album, "Penny Lane".
Finally, here's a clip from the Magical Mystery Tour TV programme itself, featuring the most demented genius song John Lennon ever wrote, "I Am The Walrus".
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- Emerson Lake & Palmer "Emerson Lake & Palmer" 1970 (UK)
- For
my annual birthday show, I always throw in a bonus CAOTW, so here's one
of my favorite guilty pleasures from yesteryear -- the notorious prog
rock supergroup Emerson Lake & Palmer. It all kicked off with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper
album, the original "Art Rock" statement, which started a
powerful late 60's meme that Rock could be Serious Music, just like
Classical and Jazz. And nobody ever took Serious Rock to a more
ridiculous extreme than this super-talented but taste-deprived power
trio! Although their fourth album Trilogy
is actually my favorite of their opuses, their debut is a relatively
satisfying and sincere stab at combining classical music with heavy
rock -- Emerson plays more acoustic than electronic keyboards
for this one, and there are no silly epics about space armadillos
battling with manticores ("Tarkus") or surrealistic carnivals run by
nefarious computers ("Karn Evil 9").
- Here's a clip of their debut album's centerpiece "Take A Pebble", featuring the mad Keith Emerson scraping the strings inside his piano. And here's my favorite of their rocked-up classical pieces, a warp speed version of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown".
The pinnacle of ELP's success was when they headlined the massive
(and televised) California Jam festival in 1974 -- here's a bit of "Karn Evil 9".
- And finally for something completely different! Here's a computerized Japanese anime character singing the third movement of "Karn Evil 9" (somehow, that's strangely fitting -- since the theme of the piece is machines taking over!)
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- Stereolab "Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements" 1993 (UK/France)
- In some ways Stereolab is the ultimate example of a postmodern band, so much so that they're almost utterly unique.
Combining riffs from trashy easy listening and French 60's
"Ya-Ya" pop with the methods of musical heavyweights like Rhys Chatham,
Pierre Henry, NEU! and Kraftwerk is the sort of high/low culture
bricolage that defines modern art. Though they wear their
influences on their sleeves, no one else has thought to combine this
particular groop of musical signifiers together before or since, and as
a result Stereolab seems to me to be the most original British band of
the last couple decades. Their music sounds like what hipsters in
the sixties would have imagined music would sound like in the 21st
century -- a past vision of the future that never came to be.
- Here's a video for the edited single version of "Jenny Ondioline",
the 18 minute centerpiece of this album which coolly combines Chatham's
"Guitar Trio" with the rhythms of NEU!'s "Hallogallo" and a dose of the
Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" -- only it's catchy POP! And here's a
ridiculous cheapo music video for one of their Marxist melodies, "Wow and Flutter".
Although they've always been a pretty fiercely "indie" band,
Stereolab achieved a certain amount of popularity in the 1990's,
peaking with the space age Dots and Loops album in 1997, featuring tunes like "Miss Modular".
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- Rhys Chatham "Factor X" 1983 (USA)
- Rhys Chatham (pronounced "Reese Chadam")
might be the most original and influential electric guitarist since
Jimi Hendrix. Chatham was an academically trained composer who
decided to join the "New York downtown scene" at the end of the
1970's with all those punk and "no wave" weirdos. Along with
contemporary Glenn Branca, Chatham created music that brought out the
"orchestral" possibilities of the harmonics and overtones of amplified guitars, particularly when a lot of them are playing
together very loud. Although more directly connected to Branca,
Sonic Youth is one obvious example of a recent popular group who
learned much from Chatham, and Stereolab is certainly another.
Though it was the lesser known Band of Susans, populated by
disciples of Rhys, which most directly applied his techniques to the
rock 'n' roll stage.
- For your video clips this week, here's a Glenn Branca guitar solo from 1978; Sonic Youth performing the Chatham-esque "Death Valley '69"; and Band of Susans in their music video for "The Pursuit of Happiness". Finally, here's the man himself: Rhys Chatham on his "G3" tour live in Oslo
(where he performed versions of his classic tune "Guitar Trio" with
pick-up bands all over the world), and here's a clip from a documentary about Chatham's 100-guitar orchestral piece "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See".
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- Miles Davis "In A Silent Way" 1969 (USA)
- Although this was actually the third album Miles Davis released featuring "electronic instruments" and "rock textures", In A Silent Way is rightly considered a landmark in his transformation from a mere jazz genius into a 20th century icon whose music transcends genre labels.
Although forward looking in many ways, this album still retains a
lot of the flavor of Miles' legendary acoustic quintet of the
mid-sixties -- stalwarts Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony
Williams were all still on board, joined by the electric
pianos of Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea, and the electric bass and guitar
of Brits Dave Holland and John McLaughlin. Another notable facet
of this recording is that the two side long compositions are spliced
together from hours of taped improvisations (again not the first time
Miles had relied on his gifted producer/editor Teo Macero to polish
things up, but nonetheless a transformational moment in that this time
the arrangements were actually created in the editing.) Miles
followed this masterpiece with the double album free form funk of Bitches Brew,
another landmark which is one of the best selling "jazz" albums in
history (although the all-time top selling jazz record apparently
remains Miles' 1959 classic Kind of Blue.)
- For a more florid review of the music on this album, read young Lester Bangs' contemporaneous review. Here's a Miles classic in his modal style of the late 1950's: "So What". And here he is 15 years later playing his totally unique style of electro-funk music: "Calypso Frelimo". Plus here's a rare clip of Miles making his transformation from "acoustic jazz" to "electric rock": "Spanish Key" live in 1969, a tune released on Bitches Brew the following year.
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- Santana "Abraxas" 1970 (Mexico/USA)
- Santana
(the group, named after lead guitarist Carlos) are well known for
their crucial role in popularizing "Latin rock" in the non-Spanish
speaking world, but they were in fact a unique and extremely
innovative band that fused a number of styles into their often
immitated (but never equaled) sound. Originally a hippie blues
band based out of San Francisco, the group's career is basically a
progression from psychedelic rock to the "jazzier" realms of fusion
music, and the high water mark in their quest was their second studio
album Abraxas, which combines classic late 60's rock with salsa grooves and jazzy arrangements.
- Here's Santana playing one of the hit singles from this album, "Oye Como Va", and here's one of the jazzy instrumentals, "Incident At Neshabur". Plus here's the live performance of "Soul Sacrifice" from the Woodstock movie which catapulted the band to fame, and finally here they are playing live in Ghana 1971.
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- Rush "Rush" 1973 (Canada)
- Rush
is another band that doesn't quite belong to the heavy metal genre, but
what else would you call a group with roots as a Zeppelin-inspired
power trio in the early 70's. When
they added synths and astrophysics to their sound in the later 70's,
they became Canada's most globally popular group. However
my favorite Rush albums are their first two, simply because these are
their least "philosophical" and also feature the most ass-kicking
riffs.
- Here's the band in 1975 playing a tune from their first album, "Finding My Way". And here they are playing the title track from their second album, "Fly By Night", and here's yet another heavy Rush classic from the early days, the Ayn Rand-inspired "Anthem". Finally, here they are decades later playing one of their big hits "Spirit of Radio" in front of a gynormous stadium full of fans.
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- Blue Cheer "Vincebus Eruptum" 1968 (USA)
- For
this week's special on the roots of heavy metal music, I give you
arguably the most important album that gave birth to that genre.
Massively distorted riffs go back at least as far as The Kinks
hit "You Really Got Me" in 1964 (or arguably even Link Wray and Dick
Dale five years before that), and there were certainly other groups
using Marshall amps to get a huge sound in 1968, but nothing before
this record was as HEAVY. In essence, Blue Cheer was a
dumbed-down garage band version of The Jimi Hendrix Experience,
only far louder (they were the first group to use an entire wall
of amplifiers in their stage show.) Their combination of menacing
attitude, sexual blues motifs, druggy references and vague occultism
also make them much "more metal" than their heavy contemporaries like
Cream or The Who.
- Here's an old TV clip of Blue Cheer's bona-fide American Top 40 hit single "Summertime Blues" which is on their debut album, and here's another song from this record, "Out of Focus"
performed live in 2007 by the current band including
original members Dickie Peterson on bass and Paul Whaley on
drums. Blue Cheer's official website.
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- Judas Priest "Sad Wings of Destiny" 1976 (UK)
- April 30 is Walpurgisnacht
(sort of a Northern European version of Hallowe'en, only in the
springtime), and next week's special is "the roots of metal", so here's
a spooky heavy metal classic. Judas Priest was part of the
second wave of heavy metal, debuting about 5 years after Led Zeppelin
and their fellow Birminghaminites Black Sabbath, but their stylistic
innovations were very influential on metal bands that followed.
Sonicly, they combined operatic vocals with rapid fire guitar
riffs -- a "fast treble" sound which was the inversion of Black
Sabbath's "slow bass" style, and the black leather and smoke
machines from their stage show were perhaps even more influential on the
development of heavy metal's look. It's hard to imagine groups
like Iron Maiden or Slayer without the Priest influence. My
favorite of all of their albums is this record, their second, which
still retains some progressive and psychedelic touches from the early
70's.
- Here's Judas Priest performing "Dreamer Deceiver"
on television in 1975, before they recorded it for this album (when Rob
Halford still had hippie hair!) Here they are in their iconic
studs 'n' leather phase, performing the hit "Breaking The Law", and here's a recent clip of the reunited band playing another Sad Wings classic, "The Ripper". Finally, here's a preview of the forthcoming 2008 Judas Priest "metal opera" Nostradamus, which hearkens back to their mid-70's sound!
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