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- Billy Cobham "Spectrum" 1973 (Panama/USA)
Review soon. |
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- Steve Hillage "Fish Rising" 1975 (UK)
Steve Hillage played in a couple lesser known early prog bands at the beginning of the 1970's (such as Space Shanty (1972) by the band Khan, which also included the keyboard player from Egg and Hatfield & The North). After he joined the weird Anglo-Australian-French-elf-hippie band Gong his
star began to rise. He left Gong around the time he recorded his debut
solo album in 1975, which is our classic album of the week. Many more
classic albums followed, over time drifting away from rock and towards
ambient soundscape music. Thus his futuristic spacy style made him a
natural collaborator for The Orb later on in the 1990's. |
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- Kate Bush "Never For Ever" 1980 (UK)
In 2022, the incredibly improbable happened when quirky artiste Kate Bush scored her first #1 hit single in America: one of her classic tunes from the 80's
was featured in a popular TV show. She had already had a number of big
hits in Europe (in fact her debut single went to #1 in her home
country more than 40 years ago), but her style has always seemed too eclectic and cerebral for
an American pop audience. You really can't compare her style to anybody
who came before her though she has influenced countless artists in her
wake. She had a few connections to the prog rock scene
(collaborating with Peter Gabriel and David Gilmour), and her dramatic flair has often been compared to David Bowie, though I think one of the few artists on her plane of existence might be the equally unclassifiable Scott Walker
(who still hasn't had a #1 hit in America and probably never will.) All
of her albums are notable, but if I were to recommend an entry point to
the casual listener I would choose her third album (this week's CAOTW).
In addition to her original style of music, Kate was an amazing
performer who trained in dance, theater and mime as well as music.
Check out some more klassik Kate videos: "Babooshka" and "Army Dreamers" are unforgettable songs from this week's classic album. Her first hit "Wuthering Heights" (1978) and a later tune "The Sensual World" (1989) are also heard on the show this week. |
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- Creedence Clearwater Revival "Green River" 1969 (USA)
This
week's classic album features yet another legendary singer / songwriter
/ guitar player from California: John Fogerty. Because his music has
always been associated with Americana and "swamp rock", and his band sounded
like they could have come from the South, few people realize that Fogerty and CCR
actually originated in Berkeley, California where they were part of the same Bay Area scene as The Dead, Jeffersons, Country Joe,
Quicksilver and Big Brother!
Creedence was massively popular for a few years, cranking out new
studio albums every few months, with
every album containing a handful of Top 10 hit singles that are still
among the most "classic of classic rock" to this very day. The songs
you've heard a million times on this album are "Bad Moon Rising"
(ultimate Americana rock) and "Lodi" (ultimate weary musician on the road ballad). The
title track "Green River" (featuring their trademark swamp rock sound)
and "Commotion" (souped-up rockabilly social commentary) were also hit
singles. Their next classic album Willy & The Poor Boys
came out three months later! The CCR train choogled on to ever higher
heights from late 1968 through 1970, then the wheels fell off for
their final 1972 album Mardi Gras:
John provided a final hit for the band ("Sweet Hitch-hiker") but
otherwise phoned it in, and he even made Stu Cook and Doug Clifford (never singers on their previous albums!) do MOST of the lead vocals! Fogerty then made The Blue Ridge Rangers
solo album in 1973, which oddly features zero original songs and is
basically a country covers album. He did make a brief comeback in the
1980's (remember that baseball song?) and I think he has played the
"state fairs and casinos oldies circuit" over the years. It's pretty
amazing how non-relevant this legendary musician has been for most of his
life, considering what a rock icon he was 50 years ago! |
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- Hot Tuna "America's Choice" 1975 (USA)
Hot Tuna is Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, formerly the bassist and lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane. They started Hot Tuna as a side project for their "blues" jamming around 1969, and after they quit the Airplane in 1973
it became their main gig and has been ever since (they're still touring
in 2022!) When they were with the Jeffersons, Jorma had been
essentially the 4th songwriter in a group with too damn many
songwriters, so Tuna really allowed him to step out as a singer and
composer. His riffs are very groovy, but his laconic singing is kind
of unusual - maybe it prefigures the slacker rock of the 1990's!
(I feel like there are a lot of interesting parallels between Hot
Tuna and 80's indie punk band Meat Puppets, another Americana rock power trio led by a tall guitar hero songwriter with his childhood buddy on bass.) America's Choice is something of a companion piece to Yellow Fever, another top shelf Tuna album released the same year. |
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- Bob Weir "Ace" 1972 (USA)
This
week's groovy classic
was the first solo album from the Grateful Dead's second-most famous
singing/songwriting guitar player, who is out on tour this
summer with "Dead & Company", the current version of the successor
band (with Billy & Mickey on drums and John Mayer on lead guitar).
Although this was technically one of three Dead solo albums released in 1972 (along with the classics Garcia and Rolling Thunder), Ace
is really the Grateful Dead's unofficial studio album of 1972. Everybody in the
mid-70's lineup of the group plays on every track of this album, including brand new
members Keith and Donna Jean, though not including departing members Pigpen (who died
that year) and Mickey Hart (who quit the band after releasing his own
solo album). Though if you think of it that way, this is also the only "Grateful Dead album" where
Jerry Garcia doesn't write or sing any of the songs. Almost every tune
on this album became a standard in the Dead's concert repetoire
(especially "Playing In The Band" which was one of their most-performed
songs ever). It also marked a transitional moment for the group's
songwriting, with this album including the last songs Weir wrote with
Robert Hunter (who would continue writing lyrics exclusively for
Jerry's songs) as well as the first songs Weir wrote with his new
songwriting partner John Barlow. |
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- eX-Girl "Endangered Species" 2004 (Japan)
For
this year's self-indulgent birthday show, I am once again indulging my
passion for weird Japanese girl groups. "eX-Girl" was a band I
discovered in 2004 with the release of this album in America on Jello
Biafra's Alternative Tentacles label (which was putting out some great
underground stuff at the time, like the Zolar X
compilation!) Their sound is uniquely their own: kind of metal, but
rough around the edges so maybe more like punk rock, plus synthesizers
and ultramodern techno sounds and three girl singers doing odd
harmonies in a quasi-operatic style. Plus, they're Japanese but sing in
English (always good for upping the weirdness factor). Sadly, this turned out to be their final album, but if you dig
it their earlier records are just as wonderfully weird. Two more of my
favorite contemporary Japanese girl groups appeared on the show this week: the
underground trance rock of OOIOO and the otaku idol pop of Dempagumi.inc! |
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- Paul McCartney "McCartney" 1970 (UK)
Paul
McCartney turns 80 years old this week! Our second bonus classic album
of the week is Mac's first solo album, which was a true solo album in
that he played all the instruments by himself in his home studio at his
farm in Scotland. At the time I think it was criticized for being
unpolished (especially compared to Abbey Road
which came out the previous year!) But that's a pretty interesting
move considering Paul's reputation as the fussy perfectionist of The
Beatles. Sure, some of the "songs" here are half-formed ideas and
doodles, but McCartney's leftovers from this period are still gems. Only one song
from this album became a staple of McCartney's catalog, the soulful
ballad "Maybe I'm Amazed" (sort of a cousin of songs like "Let It Be").
This album's greatest significance may be the "big news" that came
along with McCartney's announcement of this album's release: that he
had officially quit The Beatles. Lawsuits ensued for several years and
the quartet never played together again. |
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- Jimmy Cliff / various artists "The Harder They Come" (Original Soundtrack) 1972 (Jamaica)
This
week is our annual "vintage vinyl from 50 years ago" special featuring
the year 1972. It was kind of a weird year, and seems like kind of a
downer maan. Nixon got re-elected, the Vietnam war dragged on,
bummed-out hippies started to turn metal (or glam), and slick soul music turned
into grittier funk. Also, that was the year reggae broke out of Jamaica
and began to become popular around the world. The two big reggae albums
released that year were the international debut by Bob Marley & The Wailers
(whose previous records only came out in Jamaica) and this week's
classic album, which interestingly enough is our first ever classic
album which is a various artists compilation. Jimmy Cliff songs make up
nearly half the album, on account of he starred in the movie The Harder They Come
for which this was the soundtrack. The movie was a success and also
helped propel reggae into the mainstream (it is a lot like a Jamaican
version of the popular flix Superfly and Shaft
that came out around the same time - which also had classic soundtrack
albums.) The other tunes featured on this album include classic
Jamaican hits from the late 60's by Toots & The Maytals, Desmond
Dekker, and others. |
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- Miles Davis "On The Corner" 1972 (USA)
Miles
Davis would have been 96 years old this week. Our classic album is
another one from 50 years ago: 1972. Miles had been releasing electric rock/funk oriented albums for a couple years when On The Corner
came out, but the jazz world seemed totally unprepared for this. Miles
doesn't play much trumpet, the band doesn't bother with chord changes,
and only one track even has much of a melody! Instead what you get
are relentless, cascading polyrhythms and blasts of funky, dirty electronic noise.
It's almost like Miles invented "industrial" music! Love it or hate it, it is one of the most singular recordings of Davis' career and of the entire 1970's decade. |
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- Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band "Clear Spot" 1972 (USA)
I've
got a stack of vinyl albums from 50 years ago lined up for our "50th
anniversary of 1972" special coming up next month, so we'll be having a
bunch of classic albums from that great year for music. Captain
Beefheart released two classic albums that year, which were probably as
close as this terminally weird artist ever got to something like
mainstream "classic rock" music. All the previous Beefheart albums (except for parts of the bluesy garage rock debut album) were very far-out, psychedelic, surrealistic, and artsy. The Spotlight Kid (1972) had a lot of relatively funky stuff on it, and Clear Spot
even includes a Motown-style ballad. And for fans of the deep weirdness
that only the Magic Band could bring, this album also has one of the
group's all-time anthems of strangeness, "Big Eyed Beans From Venus". But
success was not to be, as the subsequent couple CB albums were the ones fans
refer to as the "Tragic Band" albums (hack studio musicians playing
boring music because the rest of the orignial group refused to work
with the Captain anymore). He made a comeback at the end of the 70's and his last three albums were solid weird indie rock-type albums (maybe even a little punk). |
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- The Monkees "Head" 1968 (USA/UK)
This album was the soundtrack to one of my three favorite psychedelic films of the sixties (the other two are Midnight Cowboy and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls). The movie Head
starred The Monkees and was released to no acclaim about a year after
their groundbreaking TV show had been cancelled. It was probably
intended to be their high point, but it wound up being the beginning of
the end: they only made one more appearance as a quartet after
the movie flopped, an amazing, mind-blowing disaster of a primetime TV
special called 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee
(1969). Believe it or don't, their movie soundtrack album was edited
together by Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson, who was a little-known
B-actor at the time, but he happened to be pals with Bob Rafelson
(co-creator of the Monkees TV show and the director of Head)
and of course the prefab four Micky, Davy, Mike & Peter. (Jack and
Micky in particular were notorious drinking buddies in the 1970's And
when you
watch the Head movie, keep an eye out for Nicholson and Dennis Hopper who
make a cameo during the diner scene: immediately after Head, they started work on Nicholson's breakout film Easy Rider
which was produced by Rafelson and directed by Hopper.) Anyway,
this album is really only
six Monkees songs, and the rest of its under-30-minute runtime is
padded out with groovy random dialogue and soundtrack stuff in a very
psychedelic style. But the six Monkees songs are really among their
best ever: both sides of the flop single "Porpoise Song / As We Go
Along" are ultra-classic flower power pop, Mike contributes the jangly
rocker "Circle Sky", Peter chips in two very sixites question-songs
called "Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?" and "Can You Dig
It?"
The weakest number is Davy's novelty showtune "Daddy's Song", which is
still campy fun and was written by legendary songwriter Harry Nilsson
(who got his first national exposure writing songs for the Monkees, as
did Neil Diamond!) |
