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- Uriah Heep "The Magician's Birthday" 1973 (UK)
It's
Hippie Xmas again in Madison! So this week we play only the most
dumpster-worthy cheep old records. This week's classic album is a solid
heavy rock release by one of the big names of the early 70's, and
nobody should pay more than a dollar or two to get a decent copy of
this album. Though not as plentiful as old Moody Blues and Emerson Lake & Palmer records in the bargain bins of used record shops, Uriah Heep is pretty close.
This is a mark of an artist that was once immensely popular, but which
the sands of time have rendered uncool over the years. Exactly the type
of crusty oldies we like on the Kosmik Radiation show! Uriah Heep was
basically the missing link between Deep Purple (heavy metal featuring an electric organist dueling a guitar god) and Queen (operatic vocals and campy theatricality), but also one of the many bands that lost the heavy rock competition to the mightier Black Sabbath and commercial kings of hard rock Led Zeppelin. Personally, I like their classic run of 1971-1973 LPs quite a bit, of which Magician's Birthday
was the last and perhaps best. The titular track is a hard
rock/prog/camp masterpiece (yes, they do sing a few choruses of"Happy
Birthday" to the Dear Magician). Aside from a couple dull ballads, the
rest of the album is also solid hard rock. |
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- Jerry Garcia "Garcia" 1972 (USA)
This
August 1st is Jerry Garcia's 75th birthday! It is a well-known Deadhead
trope that the Grateful Dead was always better on the concert stage
than in a recording studio, and that is generally true. In fact, I
think three of the top five "Grateful Dead studio albums" are the three
solo LP's released in 1972. Mickey's album
has already been a CAOTW and may be the group's most ambitious
recording, though it also features many other bay area acid rock stars
(the usual suspects from Jefferson Airplane and Santana). Bobby's solo album Ace
is basically a Dead studio album, featuring the entire group except for
Mickey (working on his own record, see above) even including
soon-to-join new member Donna Jean Godchaux; it introduces a number of
staples of the Dead's concert repetoire ("Playing In The Band",
"Black-Throated Wind", "Greatest Story Ever Told", "Cassidy", "One More
Saturday Night" - pretty much the entire album). The third solo album
was of course Garcia, Jerry's
debut and his most important solo recording. His LP features a few
genuinely trippy moments like "Spidergawd" and "Eep Hour" (as far-our
as any Dead studio tracks ever got), and more classic songs that would
become part of the Dead concert repetoire, most notably "Bird Song",
"Deal", "The Wheel" and "Sugaree". |
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- Goose Creek Symphony "est. 1970" 1970 (USA)
Are
they the most country "psychedelic band" of all time, or the most
psychedelic "country band" of all time? Goose Creek Symphony play
extremely downhome backporch pickin' and grinnin' old-timey country
style music, but then they periodically launch into heavy Cream-style
jams, and freely incorporate studio trickery and backwards tracks to
make their records even groovier. The LP est. 1970,
as in the band was "established" that year, was the group's debut
and the blueprint for their classic run of albums. The main
songwriter and foundational member of the group is one Charles
Gearheart, who still leads a version of the band today! I am pretty
sure GCS is the longest-running "jam band" in America, having outlasted
the Grateful Dead by nearly 20 years (and counting). |
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- T. Rex "Electric Warrior" 1971 (UK)
Popular consciousness seems to give David Bowie credit for inventing "glam rock" when he adopted his Ziggy Stardust
persona, but more than a year before that happened Marc Bolan was
already storming the charts with funky three-chord stompers coated in
glitter. If you include four albums made under the original name
Tyrannasaurus Rex, this was the sixth album featuring the songs of Marc
Bolan, the visionary and sole constant member of the band. However
those first five records were mostly twee acid folk rock which sound as
if they were recorded by elves and fairies, and which were strictly for
the hippie underground. Then in 1970 two non-album singles "Ride A
White Swan" and "Hot Love" (their first to use the shorter "T. Rex"
name) topped the British charts, and a new teenie bopper sensation was
born. Electric Warrior was
the first album's-worth of new songs by the suddenly hot band, and it
is a very well-known and acclaimed classic rock masterpiece (you know,
one of those albums that "really rocks"). Bolan remained a
very psychedelic songwriter, and turned out to be a surprisingly heavy/funky guitarist
(you would NEVER have guessed that based on his early elf-pop albums).
T. Rex's follow-up The Slider is nearly as good, and like EW
features the immortal backup vocals of "Flo & Eddie"
(ex-Turtles/ex-Mothers), AKA Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (you may
recall "Mark Volman" did Zappa stage hijinks based on the similarity of
his name to "Marc Bolan"). Sadly, Bolan's fortunes soon went into
decline after
that and he died in a car crash in 1977. Part of the problem with his
career was an obsession with "making it big in America" and ensuing
drug depression after that never panned out: T. Rex has remained a
one-hit
wonder in America on the strength of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)" from
this album. |
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- The Byrds "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" 1968 (USA)
Albums
like this are frustrating for a radio DJ: a dozen two-and-a-half minute
songs which all flow together without pauses between. All the tracks
are pretty great, and they sound even greater one-into-another like
that. But no pauses makes the vinyl difficult to cue, and just playing
a whole side of the record seems lazy (it's not one long suite it's six
different songs). The Byrds would have been recording this album
immediately in the wake of Sgt. Pepper
(last week's classic album), and a lot of artists were suddenly
arranging their material into progressive-style suites beginning that
summer. But The Byrds were a top psychedelic rock band of the day, and
at the top of their game when making this record. Their first post-Pepper
baroque moment was a wonderful single written by David Crosby, the
third (and weirdest) songwriter in the band, who was always itching to
get more of his songs recorded: it was the first time The Byrds had put
a Crosby tune out as a single, and it flopped. The Croz's next
obsession was getting them to record his menage a trois
love ballad "Triad", so before 1967 was up they kicked him out of the
band and completed this album as a trio (they had also lost another
member, Gene Clark "songwriter #2", before their previous album). But Jefferson Airplane picked up Crosby's "Triad" song, and he also co-wrote "Wooden Ships"
with Airplane's Paul Kantner and another temporarily unemployed
musician buddy, Stephen Stills. Soon after that, Crosby and Stills met
a gentle Mancunian hippie named Nash at an LA party (was it Cass
Elliot's or Joni Mitchell's pad?) and "the rest is history." Meanwhile,
The Byrds recruited legendary space cowboy Gram Parsons and they turned
into a full-blown country group before the end of 1968 (no doubt taking
a cue from Dylan, who inspired most of The Byrds best moves.) |
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- The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" 1967 (UK)
We're
featuring exclusively the music of 1967 on the show this week for
pledge drive. OK, I finally had to do this one! Released 50 years ago
this month, The Beatle's seventh studio album is where "greasy teenage
rock 'n' roll" grew up into "Rock Music for adults, which can be ART!"
There certainly was no album released that year that was more important
than this one. Lauded at the time for the fact that all the songs flow
together into connected musical suites (the dawn of Prog Rock!), in
fact there was another album released across the ocean the same week
that similarly stitched all the material together into two sidelong
suites - and arguably did it in a much more sophisticated and
thematically coherent way. That album was the second by The Mothers of
Invention, Absolutely Free.
But The Mothers were really ugly and could not write catchy melodies
and heartfelt lyrics that captured the zeitgeist like the great
Lennon-McCartney, which is the irreplaceable element that makes Sgt. Pepper more than just an innovative way to arrange songs on vinyl. |
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- Bob Dylan "Hard Rain" 1976 (USA)
Bob
Dylan has a birthday this week, so our classic album is one of his
lesser known live albums. In 1975 Bob hit the road with his Rolling
Thunder Revue tour and superband, releasing one of his most popular
70's albums Desire right in
the middle. Featuring four guitarists and two drummers, Rolling Thunder
Revue was considered one of Bob's greatest tours, and was documented as
such. But perversely, the concert footage only came out in Dylan's
four-hour art film Renaldo & Clara,
which was apparently mostly improvised vignettes featuring the band and
famous hangers on (it has never been released in any home media
format). There was also a TV special filmed at the very end of the
tour, on a rainy day (hence the title) when the band was not at their
best, or so said the critics. The 1976 TV special was panned almost as
badly as the four-hour movie would be when it finally came out in 1978.
But I never saw the TV special or knew the backstory behind this
album when I first heard it, and it sounds like a pretty rockin' Bob
Dylan album to me. "Maggies Farm" is particuarly blistering, with Bowie's guitarist Mick Ronson
on lead. "Shelter From The Storm" had been a gentle folk song in the
studio, but in concert it's a rousing rockandroll party. In a way this
album almost prefigures the coming punk and new wave trends: the band
might be a bit sloppy, but it's loud music to jump around to - a rare
"fun" Dylan album that "rocks"! |
