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- Herbie Hancock "Head Hunters" 1973 (USA)
Miles
Davis would have been 97 next week. He was the most important musician
in the development of jazz fusion, and Herbie Hancock was right there
with him bridging Miles' last acoustic period and early electronic era.
Herbie left Miles to lead his own band around 1971, originally a very
interesting group called Mwandishi which has already had a couple of classic albums. After Mwandishi's three albums, next came Head Hunters,
and it was a very successful pop album and become one of the
best-selling albums in the history of jazz. The secret was, of course,
FUNK. It could also be compared to Miles' On The Corner album from the previous year, in that Head Hunters
music is primarily textural and rhythmic with limited emphasis on
melody and harmony. One of the notable tracks here is a remake of the
song "Watermelon Man", which Herbie had written in the early 1960's and
became a Top 40 pop hit around 1962 when recorded by Mongo Santamaria
(Herbie was in Mongo's band for a brief period.) That was a
groundbreaking latin jazz crossover hit, and the 1973 remake adds
synths and African sounds to take it simultaneously further into the
future and the past. The Sly Stone-inspired
"Sly" and funky spic "Chameleon" are also fusion classics, and this
album is rounded out by a spacy mood piece called "Vein Melter." |
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- Tomita "The Bermuda Triangle" 1979 (Japan)
Isao
Tomita (1932-2016) was one of the world's top electronic music auteurs
during the period when electronic music became popular and widespread.
As a recording artist, he was best known for a series of albums in the
1970's featuring synthesizer interpretations of classical music. (As a
pop culture legend, in the 1980's he put on some "Sound Cloud"
outdoor concerts featuring bazillion-watt multispeaker sound systems and Tomita
hovering over the audience in a glass pyramid!) His first album Snowflakes Are Dancing
(1974) consisted of whimsical synth versions of Debussy's "tone poems"
and was an unlikely hit record from the classical music world -
probably because its "spacy" sound made it appealing to fans of Pink
Floyd, ELP, and other "switched-on" rockers of the day. Tomita followed
these up by giving the music of Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, and Holst the
same treatment and these were also very popular for "classical" albums.
The Holst album The Planets
(1976) was particularly great and works as an instrumental concept
album: he created "alien voices" and synthesized sound effects to help
weave the pieces on the album into a larger narrative. His 1977 album Kosmos was a more eclectic grab-bag of pieces, the focus being Tomita's synth version of the theme from Star Wars
(there were a whole lot of Star Wars-themed records that came out
that year!!) Next up came his most ambitious recording, this week's
Classic Album, which is mostly based on musical themes by the Russian
composer Prokofiev. Tomita re-titles these pieces and weaves them
together along with a few original tunes, a Sibelius piece, and
John Williams' iconic Theme From Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
The result is a continuous suite of music nearly an hour long, which
(according to the groovy cover art) is a story about the Bermuda
Triangle, UFOs, underwater civilizations, mermaids, and "love"! |
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- Iggy Pop & James Williamson "Kill City" rec. 1975, rel. 1977 (USA)
Iggy
Pop turned 76 years old this week! He has been touring with a new
album in 2023! (Also, Kosmik Radiation has been on the air for 18 years
this week!) His legendary band The Stooges made three incredibly classic albums that defined punk rock in 1969 and 1970 (the original group) and 1973
after bassist Dave Alexander got fired, guitarist Ron Asheton was
demoted to bass, and James Williamson took over as lead guitarist
and became Iggy's songwriting partner. The Stooges continued to tour
into 1974, and Iggy and James recorded demos for a fourth album in
1975. But The Stooges were never a commercial success and the pop scene
was going disco, so nobody was interested in giving them a record deal.
Then the Sex Pistols arrived in 1977, and
instantly Stooge music (and Iggy's burgeoning solo career) went from
uncool to cutting edge. Those demos got cleaned up and released on an
indie label as Kill City.
It's very low-fidelity compared to the earlier Stooge records, which
were not exactly high-fidelity to begin with! But that seems like a
perfect frame for Iggy's scathing lyrics about life on the mean
streets. At the time he was writing and recording this, he was living
in a drug rehab center after nearly killing himself with heroin.
Lyrically,
it is probably the "real-est" album of his entire career. Musically, it
has a lot of the cool guitar riffs Williamson brought to Raw Power,
some very catchy songs, and more musical variety than their earlier
records. It's a very interesting record every Stooges and Iggy fan
should know about. |
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- Led Zeppelin "Physical Graffiti" 1975 (UK)
This
is Classic Album #750, so it had to be something monumental! Led
Zeppelin was the ultimate classic rock band: they were to the 1970's
what the Beatles were to the 1960's. This was their only studio double
album, consisting of about two-thirds new material (too much for a
single album) "padded" with outtakes from their previous three albums
for the remainder (of course their "outtakes" are better than most
bands' hits). "Trampled Under Foot" was a Top 40 single in America
(barely) and "Houses Of The Holy" (title track for their previous album which was not on that album)
and "Kashmir" have gotten a lot of radio airplay over the years.
But there's so much more great stuff here! "In My Time Of Dying" is one
of their best blues performances (Bob Dylan also did this song on his
debut album.) The country-esque "Down By The Seaside" sounds kind of
like Neil Young and the catchy and funky "Night Flight" seems like it was inspired by Joni Mitchell's "This Flight Tonight": both of those tracks are intriguing outtakes from Led Zeppelin IV. There's also folkie jams left over from the third album.
But the most interesting tracks may be the new ones they recorded in
1974: they represent Zep at their most prog-tastic, particularly on the
epics "Ten Years Gone", "In The Light" and of course "Kashmir." |
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- The Who "Quadrophenia" 1973 (UK)
The
Who created the first "rock opera" in late 1966, in the form of a
10-minute long multi-sectioned song called "A Quick One (While He's
Away)" from their second album. Their third album The Who Sell Out
was not an "opera" but it was one of the earliest "concept albums": it
is meant to sound like a radio station, with jingles and announcements
in between songs that parody teen culture. The Big One came in 1969,
with their most famous rock opera Tommy,
an ambitious double-album which tells the story of a deaf, dumb and
blind pinball player who becomes a messiah. That one was such a
success, naturally there was pressure to follow it up with another
"rock opera": this coincided with The Who substantially reducing their
output from a couple albums every year to one every two or three years,
probably because long-form works like that take a long time to write,
arrange, and record. The rock opera Lifehouse never got completed, instead the best bits from that wound up on the classic album Who's Next (1971). A couple years later, the group finally released what is arguably their magnum opus: Quadrophenia,
a loose but highly emotional story that relates directly to the roots
of the guys in the band, and features a truly orchestral and cinematic
sound (they didn't have the budget for an orchestra on Tommy,
which is why that album sounds a lot thinner than this one.) Audience
response seems like it was mixed at the time: the silly pinball story
from their last rock opera was a lot easier to understand, and the music
they were doing in 1973 is a lot more introspective than their sixties
hits. It was not one of their more successful tours. After this, The
Who retreated and never attempted another conceptual record while the
original members were still alive (though Pete Townshend has written a
few more "rock operas" since then.) Quadrophenia
got a second wind at the end of the seventies when it was turned into a
movie that was pretty good: rather than the over-the-top fantasy of the
jukebox musical movie version of Tommy, Quadro: The Motion Picture
is a realistic film about troubled youth that is not really a musical
at all. The members of The Who did not even appear in the film (like they did in Tommy), though the
musician Sting
has a small role (as an actor not a singer). For The Who's 1979 tour, they brought
back a lot of the material from this album and it worked better the
second time around after fans had a chance to see the film. The
surviving members have dusted it off a few more times since then, and
they play about half of Quadrophenia on their latest record The Who With Orchestra Live At Wembley (recordings from a 2019 concert just released on album a couple weeks ago). |
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- Spiritualized "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space" 1997 (UK)
A few months ago we finally added a Spacemen 3
album to the hall of Classics, so here's one of the groovy successor
bands to that influential group. Spacemen 3 was led by two
singer/songwriter guitarists: Sonic Boom (Peter Kember) and J. Spaceman
(Jason Pierce). When S3 split up, Kember created a project called Spectrum
which is heavy on drones and electronics (like krautrock) while Pierce
called his new group "Spirtualized" probably because he was the one who
brought the blues, garage rock, and even gospel elements to the
Spacemen 3 sound. In addition to the shoegazer aesthetic (long songs
with few chords), Spiritualized also maintained the drug references
from the earlier band, though with a twist. While Spacemen 3 recalled
the sixties "street drug" scene (acid, speed, smack), Spiritualized
imagery more often references prescription pharmaceuticals. I think
"where there's so much
smoke there must be some fire" as far as all the drug references in
this music, but it also seems clear that pharmaceutical nirvana is
being used as a metaphor throughout these songs. They are romantic,
soulful, earnest, and so full of pain - the singer seeks a chemical
escape from all that pain because he feels too much (click the album
cover for a review with some of
the gritty details behind this particular record). Spiritualized albums
have continued in this vein up to the present day (most recent LP was
2022), but I feel that their third album Ladies And Gents is their most potent dose of ecstasy and woe. |
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- Jethro Tull "Thick As A Brick" 1972 (UK)
When
it comes to The Greatest Progressive Rock Concept Album Of All Time,
this week's classic album is a strong contender. The album consists of
a single multi-sectioned 43 minute song called "Thick As A Brick" which
is split into two halves for the original vinyl LP release. It's a
completely integrated piece, with musical motiffs that repeat and
develop over the course of the thing, and a storyline in the lyrics.
The instrumental arrangement includes lots of "tricky bits" with weird
scales and difficult time signatures (sooo prog). But I think
what really makes it is that this record doesn't take itself very
seriously
- composer Ian Anderson always maintained Monty Python's Flying Circus
was a major influence on Brick
and that it was intended to be a parody of a prog-rock concept album.
The inspiration for doing so was critics and fans incorrectly deducing that the
band's previous album Aqualung
was a concept album with a story, when it was not - listeners assumed
this based on enigmatic album art and song titles combined with the
unifying quirkiness of Anderson's song writing. This album is also a
subtle dig
at the audience in a couple ways: the "plot" of TATB
involves an artistic young man being shunned by society for using rude
words (the masses are mindless nagscolds with vapid imaginations) and of course that title: "Thick As A
Brick" as in, "you stupid people." Despite being the snottiest wankers
in prog, Jethro Tull was massively popular all over the world in the
early seventies, particularly in the USA - where this record went
straight to #1 on the album charts! |
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- Sly & The Family Stone "Life" 1968 (USA)
Today is the 79th birthday of Sylvester Stewart a.k.a. Sly Stone! His classic run of albums began with his 1967 debut and lasted until the mercurial and underrated 1973 album Fresh.
He made about four more albums after that, each with fewer and fewer
members of the original Family Stone (which had included his brother
Freddie, sister Rose, cousin Larry, and eventual baby-mama
Cynthia). By the 1980's his career was washed up, and the long-promised
comeback never really happened (in the 2000's he did short tours of
Japan and Europe with members of the original Family and made a weird
and brief appearance at the Grammys one year.) The last I heard was
that he won a lawsuit over embezzled royalties and was to receive a
pile of money (a few years before that it was reported that he was
living in a van.) Anyway, all of the classic Sly albums were already
inducted into the Weekly hall of fame except this one - last to join is
the third album Life, which is the odd one out among his classic albums. It includes no big hits (like the album that preceded it),
and compared to the first two albums the songs are much shorter and
tighter while the psychedelic studio tricks have been replaced by
intricately arranged grooves and vocal interplay. The themes of the
lyrics are moving away from Black pride / soul power topics to more
universal flower-powery hippie concerns, which would reach their
pinnacle on the best-selling Woodstock-era follow-up Stand! (1969). After that, the music got darker and the early seventies were probably the heighth of his genius
- but also the beginning of escalating personal problems (drugs,
marriage and divorce, and not having money because of the drugs and
divorce.) |
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- De La Soul "3 Feet High And Rising" 1989 (USA)
We
recently lost a hip-hop pioneer and underground music legend: David J.
Jolicoeur, better known as "Trugoy The Dove", "Plug Two", or simply
"Dave" from De La Soul has passed away. Though their debut is not my favorite De La Soul album,
it truly was the most groundbreaking rap album of 1989. After years of
track suits, gold chains, and boasting over disco beats, in 1988 Public Enemy
had just blown everybody's minds by taking rap in a
revolutionary direction nusically and politically. Then here comes
De La Soul, surreal "hippies" from the suburbs (Long Island)
giving expression to a facet of the Black experience not often heard
from (nerdy stoners). Although their pals Jungle Brothers actually beat
them out of the gate by a year (and A Tribe Called Quest
would surpass them in popularity), it was De La Soul's debut album that
made "alternative rap" into a thing. Of the two main rappers in De La,
Kelvin Mercer a/k/a "Posdnous" always got the most attention (he was
"Plug One" after all), and he is a brilliant, charismatic rapper - but
"Dave" was the one who always grabbed my attention for his weirder
rhymes and laid back vibes. "Plug Three" is P.A. Mase aka Maseo
(Vincent Mason) the DJ, who also raps and sings with the group more
often than most DJ's do. The "fourth De La" on their early albums was
their brilliant producer Prince Paul (Hudson), who made sampling
psychedelic. Unfortunately, 21st century corporate media monopolization
has made the sampling techniques Paul used virtually impossible today -
De La Soul's albums were unavailable on digital streaming services
until very recently because of all the copyright claims (and the band
probably won't get much if any money from their music because of
all those sampling royalties). At least you've got the Kosmik Radiation show
whose DJ curator still has original copies of their classic albums to
play for you! |
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- Lou Reed "Transformer" 1972 (USA)
Hot on the heels of his breakout album, David Bowie and his guitar player Mick Ronson produced this classic record which resurrected the career of the founder of The Velvet Underground.
In fact, it propelled Lou Reed to unimaginable heights: not only was it
a "gold record", one of the songs "Walk On The Wild Side" became
an unlikely Top 20 hit in America, receiving substantial radio
airplay even though it has uncensored super-gay lyrics. The song is about some of the characters from Andy Warhol's "Factory", all of whom were gay and/or trans - as in Transformer, the name of the album! (The photos on the back
of the record make this point obvious.) So needless to say this record was
a milestone in popuar culture. But it is also musically timeless,
and quite unlike any other popular records of it's era (except for
Bowie's, but I think that's mostly because Bowie produced this one and
used some of the same musicians - the two have very different styles of singing and songwriting). Transformer
is much more "cabaret" than the Velvets music (though several of the
tunes are recycled VU outtakes), and I think a big part of its
popularity is due to Reed's vocal performance on the album. Never a
"singer's singer" (to put it mildly), Lou's charm and warmth really
shine through in his hipster crooning here (yes, I actually used the
words "charm and warmth" to describe the notorious Lou Reed!) |
