I wrote this rather epic-length piece as part-discography, part-history, part-critique, and part-review of ELO in 2018. It’s a lengthy mind-purge, a musical data-dump of my thoughts about this band. As I continue to take a break from the primary mission of this web site’s writing series, I am posting it here just to get it out into the world.
But first: our last visit from Dazzler! It’s that sound engineer’s job to fix those “P” plosives, not Dazz’s. Get a pop filter on that mic, duder! [From Dazzler #22, ©Marvel]
It was roughly forty years ago that I acquired the first two rock albums that I can remember owning: A New World Record by Electric Light Orchestra (henceforth referred to as ELO), and Rock n’ Roll Over by Kiss (henceforth not referred to at all). It would not be fair to say that these records were the sole vector leading to my eventual decision to pursue music recording, live sound, and occasional musical performance as a career, but they were both certainly a small but integral part of a vastly bigger canon of influence.
It’s a rather unlikely eventuality that these records have remained at all meaningful to me today. Shortly after bonding with them, or imprinting if you will – the way a baby bird imprints on its mother – my tastes veered away from the classic rock pantheon towards the more edgy punk, post-punk, and new wave genres before drifting away from rock music completely. If we consider some other bands that ELO fans might like, let’s say (I’m completely guessing here) Boston, Supertramp, the Moody Blues, Styx, or Steely Dan, I have never been a fan of any of them to any real degree. Only the Moody Blues have ever graced my record collection, and in their case it was a passing fancy. But somehow, even as my young tastes moved into Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, Devo, and The Clash, and then into classic jazz and jump blues, world music, electronic experimentalism, and various roots genres – basically anything but modern rock and pop – ELO has remained a stalwart if incongruous wildcard in my lifelong playlist.
During the past few years, the music of ELO has drifted back into a phase of prominence in my (blue) world. Part of the reason for this must have to do with the notion that Jeff Lynne, the co-founder, lead vocalist, sole songwriter, guitarist, and producer of all of the ELO records (except for the first one, on which he shared the above duties with Roy Wood) has recently made a rather high-profile and successful decision to resurrect the band after decades of inactivity.
ELO was formed in 1971 by Lynne, Wood, and Bev Bevan, all of whom were then members of a successful pop band called The Move. ELO was to be a side project of The Move, inspired into action by the increasing presence of orchestral instruments in rock and pop recordings. Motivated by certain orchestrally ornamented Beatles records, Lynne, Wood, and Bevan wanted to incorporate a full-time string section into a rock band. This idea hadn’t really been tried before. Surprisingly, no one of note seems to have repeated the idea since ELO’s initial efforts drew to a close in 1986. The band’s first album was Electric Light Orchestra (1971; called No Answer in the U.S.). It consisted of long meandering prog-rock pieces, which were in vogue at the time. Anchored by cellos scraping away relentlessly (seeming to have been lifted straight from The Beatles’ I Am the Walrus), ELO’s debut single 10538 Overture served as a strong statement of purpose amid an otherwise unremarkable album.
The follow-up album, ELO2 (1972), contained more of the same: five lengthy songs rambling along without much direction, punctuated by the novelty of strings combined with synthesizers: old meets new. ELO2 was given a breath of life via a rousing cover of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven, which became the band’s traditional concert encore right through 2018. Wood left the band near the beginning of the album’s recording sessions, while bassist Richard Tandy was wisely promoted to keyboard player. His contributions to the band over the next fourteen years would be second only to Lynne’s. ELO’s On The Third Day (1973) had even less going for it than the mostly-forgettable ELO2, milking the prog angle until its last dying breath. Only Ma-Ma-Ma Belle – an energetic single featuring guest guitarist Marc Bolan of the band T-Rex – showed signs that the band were actually awake during the record’s production.
With the prog angle played out and the band seemingly bored with itself already, ELO should, by all rights, have been relegated to rock history’s footnotes: “Short-lived side-project of The Move” is about all they would have mustered at this point. But then Jeff Lynne, who had become the unquestioned driving force behind every ELO song, came up with a great inter-album single (Showdown) and then ditched the prog elements of ELO to focus on that other great trope of 1970s rock music: the concept album. Seemingly overnight, he elevated his production chops considerably, and decided to unashamedly embrace his love for the less weird and more pop end of the Beatles canon. He began to write lushy produced and insanely well-crafted pop songs. The result was Eldorado (1974), an album of loosely connected songs about a man quixotically daydreaming of bygone heroes such as “Robin Hood and William Tell and Ivanhoe and Lancelot” (as on the album’s biggest hit, Can’t Get It Out Of My Head). Along with rousing numbers like Poor Boy (the Greenwood), Boy Blue, and Eldorado’s title track – on which Lynne first unleashes his inner Roy Orbison, belting out dramatic lines with a powerful chest voice that had remained subdued in all previous ELO releases – this was a man who had finally found his footing.
A man. Not a band. There could be no doubt after Eldorado that ELO was all about Jeff Lynne. The others were along for the ride. Although Bevan and Tandy were still aboard, the string section had been swapping members in and out of the ensemble this whole time. After Eldorado, ELO finally landed a fairly stable trio of two cellists and a violinist (Hugh McDowell, Melvyn Gale, and Mik Kaminsky), and a permanent bassist (Kelly Groucutt), finally stabilizing the classic lineup of ELO by 1975. They soon recorded the first truly great ELO album, Face the Music, featuring the hit singles Evil Woman and Strange Magic. With all pretenses towards art-rock out of his system after Eldorado, Lynne devoted himself with laser-like focus to writing pure pop songs. By 1980, ELO had charted fifteen Top 20 hits in the U.S. (plus another five in the bottom half of the Top 40) and twenty Top 20 hits in the U.K., thus racking up more Top 40 hits than any other band in history. Another piece of trivia: they also hold the record in the U.S. for being that band who have had the most Top 40 hits without ever having had a #1.
Looking back on ELO’s output, this was never a band who were concerned with virtuoso musicianship, even during their prog phase. Lynne, Bevan, Tandy, and their crew always got the job done, presenting a level of playing that was solid and professional, but never impressive. Musically, the strength of ELO records was always in the arrangements, which included complex vocal harmonies mixed with a rock rhythm section, synthesizers, studio effects, and increasingly large string and choir sections, if not entire light orchestras. With Tandy and orchestral arranger Louis Clark helping him out, Lynne’s simple pop songs and uncomplicated musicianship were ornamented with deeply impressive layers of sound, interlocking melodic counterpoint, and sonic ear candy pulled from his endless supply of inventive ideas. Witness the soaring cosmic atmospheres that open A New World Record, the haunting ambient intro to Fire on High (the first track on Face the Music), and the gentle mockery aimed at legislators trying to ban “backward masking” on rock records such as Secret Messages (the backwards bit rather innocuously says, “welcome to the show”).
A lot of this inspiration came, once again, directly from The Beatles, who Lynne has been unflinching about praising as mentors. Returning the favor, John Lennon was once quoted as saying that if the Beatles had stayed together past 1970, they would have sounded like ELO. High praise for Lynne indeed, and in retrospect it seems perfectly natural for ELO to have taken over the Beatles’ mantle, releasing the first ELO record just a year after the Beatles dissolved. Considering the sheer number of hits produced, the penchant for studio experimentation, and the quality of the songwriting, ELO were truly the keepers of the Beatles’ flame.
Lynne would of course get to repay his heroes in the future: during his heyday as an independent producer in the 1990s and 2000s, he would oversee records for Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison – all three surviving Beatles – as well as playing with Harrison in the supergroup Traveling Wilburys. As an encore, Lynne would produce a 1995 Beatles reunion on which McCartney, Harrison, and Starr played along with two archival tapes of the late Lennon singing, to create the first new Beatles songs in 25 years. We’re unlikely to witness a repeat of this feat, especially with Harrison now gone.
Unlike the frequently poetic Beatles however, Lynne’s lack of interest in showy musicianship seemed to be a character trait that carried over to his lyrics. The man never seemed to have much of a point of view. He certainly had no Revolution in him – at least not without Wood around. In the Wood era, songs like 10538 Overture tell the story of an escaped prisoner, Kuima (from ELO2) laments a lost soldier, and In Old England Town unflinchingly catalogs various scourges upon modern life. Roy Wood’s influence resulted in the recording of obvious prog tropes like The Battle of Marston Moor (on Electric Light Orchestra), but ELO completely ceased to be the slightest bit political after Wood’s departure very early in the band’s history.
Case in point: Roy Wood’s influence on the first two ELO albums resulted in lyrics like
“My, my Kuiama, don’t break your heart tryin’
To say how your Ma and your Pa passed away
And they left you to wander in the ruin and decay
Real mean, that bullet machine
Kuia I just shot them, I just blew their heads open
And I heard them scream in their agony
Kuiama she waits there for me
True blue, you saw it through”
and:
“Down, down, at the launching pad
Giant phallus stands erect
Ten thousand tons of waste throb then eject
Look out space, we’re gonna change our place
Down, down, in old England town
There was air and now there’s smoke
Let’s build more cars and drive away before we choke
Suddenly it’s always night time”
This all stopped after Wood took a powder in favor of lyrics that become more trite with each passing album – resulting in progressively bigger hits. Later in the band’s career, when Jeff Lynne wanted to stick it to the man in 1983, the best kiss-off he could come up with was “welcome to the show”.
Not only that, but post-Wood ELO records are remarkably cool in tone. When Jeff musters up just a little bit of grit in his voice during Ma-Ma-Ma-Belle, that’s one of the very few times in the ELO catalog that we hear him threatening to sound like a hard rocker. We do hear him getting a little bit rowdy on Do Ya’ (1976), but that’s a recycled Move song from his youth, which was apparently rather tame. Even while listing his grievances against the titular woman who done him wrong in Evil Woman, he sounds conspicuously composed. With that song now more than forty years old and with the two generations of feminism having come and gone since it was a hit, Evil Woman is the only post-Wood ELO song I can think of that might be considered even vaguely impolite, even by today’s rather tense standards. Consider that ELO’s commercial heyday precisely coincided with punk, and this relaxed demeanor seems even more surprising if not downright anachronistic (as opposed to anarchistic).
Lynne also comes across as rather quiet in his infrequent interviews, and strikes me as being a remarkably humble man. Perhaps even quite shy. Is the lack of any real lyrical point of view in the ELO catalog part of an unwillingness to raise controversy because he’s just a gentle man, or was it to make sure that record sales were uninhibited by the slightest hint of offense to anyone, anywhere, ever? Maybe this is another reason for the recent resurgence in the band’s popularity: Lynne’s unwillingness to risk offense or controversy works well within the current zeitgeist. This is the man who was so polite (or skittish) that he sang “one of these days you’re gonna break your glass” in Don’t Bring Me Down, because he was clearly not comfortable singing “ass”. Rather, he built a career singing about loneliness and lost love in a retro-1950s style reminiscent of his other heroes, like Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers, and Del Shannon (all of whom he would work with post-ELO when not busying himself with Beatle members). Perhaps the reason why Lynne’s considerable talent was dismissed for so many years after the dissolution of ELO is precisely because of this. While bands like the Clash or Elvis Costello or Gang of Four sang about things that mattered, Lynne seemed to studiously avoid releasing anything other than carefully crafted electric light entertainment.
When you get right down to it, Jeff’s lack of lyrical ambition was so profound that he resorted to singing about the weather with shocking regularity. The Beatles were not completely immune from this habit either: witness Here Comes the Sun, I’ll Follow the Sun, Sun King, and Good Day Sunshine. Conversely, ELO seemed far too melancholy for so much sunshine, so Jeff typically sang about the rain: Rain is Falling, Love and Rain, and the entire Concerto for a Rainy Day – including Standin’ in the Rain, Big Wheels, Summer and Lightning, and Mr. Blue Sky. Lynne also sings of the rain during Ticket to the Moon, I Need Her Love, Kuiama, and of course in Showdown, where it’s “raining all over the world”, and Evil Woman in which we learn that “there’s a hole in my head where the rain comes in”. So that’s where all this rain comes from! Oh wait, the Beatles also did a song called Rain. That’s ELO’s whole career inspiration right there in that one song. If we wanna go really dark here, ELO’s weather report got pretty grim with Laredo Tornado and the forecast even calls for meteor showers (in Here is the News).
If Jeff Lynne was obsessed with rain, he was even more taken with the color blue: Mr. Blue Sky, Midnight Blue, Boy Blue, Blue (yes, just “blue”), Birmingham Blues, Bluebird is Dead – and its apparent prequel Bluebird – plus the album Out of the Blue. Not to mention singing of “my blue world” in Turn to Stone.
ELO’s science fiction themes (or really, lack thereof) are interesting to dissect as well. Although the band is deeply associated with intergalactic iconography, this material is completely absent in either lyrical content or album cover art until we pick up the discography where we left off above (after Face the Music), and come to the band’s sixth album, the holy A New World Record (1976). It is here that ELO’s iconic spaceship logo – inspired by the design of a Wurlitzer jukebox – first appears. The album hints at something slightly otherworldly on the closing track of side one, Mission (A New World’s Record) but the sci-fi references begin and end there. The follow-up record (and ELO’s commercial peak) Out of the Blue (1978) presents the spaceship logo on both the inside and the outside of the double-LP’s gatefold sleeve, now fully realized as a complexly rendered working interstellar craft. But there isn’t a single word of space fantasy present within the lyrics of any of Out of the Blue’s seventeen songs. The Out of the Blue stage show was semi-legendary for having a mechanical spaceship descend from the lighting truss during the gig (it is said that the band needed seven trucks just to carry that set-piece from city to city), but it doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the music.
The next record, the very disco Discovery (1979), also ignores any sci-fi trappings within the songs, and reimagines the spaceship logo as some sort of glowing art object being discovered by an Aladdin-like character. A little drama plays out on the front and back covers of the album sleeve: on the front he’s stealing the object from a treasure chest, while on the back he’s being chased over a dune by Arabs with scimitars. Next, ELO took some time to write five songs for the Olivia Newton-John movie Xanadu (1980) about a Greek muse with an affinity for roller skating who appears in California to help a painter.
It isn’t until the next proper ELO record, Time (1981), that the band fully embraced their interstellar legacy. Interestingly, the spaceship logo was retired for Time’s album art, but the music returns to the concept album format, this time dealing with time travel to the year 2095, tickets to the moon, robot girlfriends, and prisons on “satellite two”. If ELO are forever to be associated with science fiction or outer space, this is the record that justifies it. We could strongly argue that the conceit of a concept album was well past its expiration date by 1981 (although Styx did fairly well with Kilroy Was Here two years later), but ELO made Time work. The 1970s ELO hit machine seemed to have run its course after Discovery and Xanadu however. In a clear reaction to the new wave records that were all over the charts by 1981, Lynne tried to keep ELO relevant on Time by firing the string section – the element of ELO that initially inspired the band’s very existence – and letting Tandy’s synthesizers come to the forefront. The video for the single Here is the News shows the entire band simultaneously playing keyboards. Although Time’s singles aren’t as well-remembered as some of the band’s previous work, it is a strong record when taken as a whole, and may be their most underrated album. Their most over-rated? I’m just gonna say it: Out of the Blue has a fair amount of filler, and all of the songs sound too samey for my taste. It would have made a phenomenal single-LP, but the double format doesn’t work as well for me as it might.
The final two records by the original incarnation of ELO were Secret Messages (1983) and Balance of Power (1986), neither of which returned to any science fiction themes in either the songs or the cover art. But somehow, this band are nonetheless remembered for the spaceship.
After a fifteen year break during which he racked up many of the aforementioned production credits, Jeff Lynne unsuccessfully tried to resurrect ELO in 2001 with an album called Zoom. The record flopped and a planned tour was canceled. A video of a studio performance in California exists, and the cover art for both the DVD of that show and the Zoom CD featured a fresh take on the spaceship idea. The album art for several subsequent ELO compilation albums used new variations of the spaceship art prominently, such as All Over the World – The Very Best of [ELO], Ticket To the Moon – the Very Best of [ELO] volume 2, the Flashback boxed set, and Mr. Blue Sky – The Very Best of [ELO].
That last one featured brand new re-recordings of ELO’s hits performed by Lynne solo in the studio. The official line was that he always felt that he could have made the original recordings better, but the real scoop probably has something to do with the notion that he owns the masters to these new recordings, so he makes more money when the songs are licensed to films, television shows, and video games. In the 21st century music economy, licensing brings in far more money than record sales or live performance, so it’s only natural that Lynne wanted to avoid sharing that sweet cash with his former record label. Many other bands have used this ploy of re-recording their hits once their label contracts have expired. Off the top of my head I can think of the albums Spot the Difference by Squeeze, Forgeries by Def Leppard, Return the Gift by Gang of Four, and Greatest Hits Deluxe Redux by Blondie. There are hundreds of others. All of these records have attempted to sound like the original recordings in exacting detail so as to give listeners as much of the nostalgic original magic as possible, while still making bank for the artists who can now license the new master instead of the old one, which may be owned by a prior record label.
Between the release of the eleventh and final original ELO album (Balance of Power, 1986) and the doomed Zoom in 2001, a group of former ELO members (including Bevan, Groucutt, Kaminski, and Clark) had been touring as ELO Part Two with a new frontman (a Lynne look-alike no less), and they even released two albums worth of new songs. Lynne was not happy about this, but since Bevan was a founding member of ELO, he had legal rights to hit the road playing Lynne’s songs under a variant of the ELO name. And let’s face it, none of the other guys in the band were making even a tiny fraction of Lynne’s income, since he got all of the songwriting royalties, which were further bolstered by his magnificently successful career as a producer. The other lads presumably needed the cash.
When Bevan finally retired ELO Part Two in 2000, he sold his share of the ELO name to Lynne. Now sole owner of the brand, it is probably safe to assume that this turn of events inspired Lynne to release Zoom within a year. Lynne’s return to the band – his band – which had been in Bevan’s custodianship for some fourteen years was short lived. Save for a guest appearance by Tandy on one song, no former ELO members were invited by Lynne to participate in the making of Zoom. The failure of that record seemed to signal the end of ELO for good. ELO seemed to be relegated to the ranks of 1970s has-beens and bands who no one seemed very interested in discussing. ELO were considered deeply uncool at that point, and to say that they were ready for a critical reappraisal in 2001 would have been premature. The band’s classic hits needed to marinate for quite a bit longer before they matured to classic or legendary status instead of being simply dismissed as old or irrelevant.
ELO’s time for renewed respect finally came in 2014. The BBC persuaded Lynne to do a one-off show in London’s Hyde Park on September 14 of that year. The phenomenal success of that gig made Lynne realize that the time was finally right to give ELO another shot. In 2015 he did another seven shows in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and recorded Alone in the Universe — another record written, performed, and produced solely by himself (now as “Jeff Lynne’s ELO”) with virtually no other musicians. Even Tandy – the sole classic ELO member to participate in the 2014 and 2015 gigs – was conspicuously missing from the record. Lynne supported Alone in the Universe in 2016 with 24 U.K. and European gigs (plus L.A. and New York), and then just four U.K. gigs in 2017. Sadly, Tandy’s health precluded him from being present for the 2017 shows. Lynne turned 70 that year, and was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with Wood, Bevan, and Tandy.
The thirty-six gigs during the four years from 2014 to 2017 were all sell-out shows in arenas every bit as large, or larger, than the ones that ELO hauled their model spaceship to in the 1970s. The last of the 2017 gigs was recorded for a double-CD and DVD/Blu-Ray set called Wembley or Bust, and showcased Lynne and his thirteen-piece band of highly skilled session players performing in London. The line-up seen in the Wembley video has been stable since 2015, save for replacing Tandy with an understudy in 2017 and swapping in a new string trio in 2016 (this band has worse luck retaining string players than Roxy Music had with bassists – they had a different bass player for every single album). Naturally, the latest version of the spaceship appeared on the album cover, even if it didn’t show up above the stage at the gigs, except perhaps as projected on video. During the live shows that happened in 2014 through 2018, rear screen projection featured heavy use of outer space footage: galaxies, asteroid fields, and voyages through the cosmos. But lyrically, the record ignores the subject in the same way that every record except Time has, preferring to focus on Jeff’s old standbys: loneliness (see: album title), the weather (Love and Rain and The Sun Will Shine on You), and blue (Blue).
And now in 2018, here is the news: a proper U.S. tour would be staged, the first one in 37 years. Twelve shows. So, let’s forget Jeff Lynne’s career for a moment and talk about mine. After three decades spent working in the music industry, and after having worked on some two thousand live gigs in my career (ELO Part One only did 669, according to setlist.fm!), it’s pretty hard to get me excited about a concert. But somehow, I was inordinately giddy about this tour. The only question was: Tandy? The answer: No. His health was still not up to it. Nonetheless, after being vaguely aware of the Time tour happening in 1981, but being too young to go (my first concert would be a certain new wave band in early 1984), I finally had a chance to see ELO this year. Tickets were procured for the Chicago show, and for good measure I’d be attending a New York gig as well. I’d never visited Madison Square Garden before, and I had an $11 flight (using frequent flier miles) and a friend who’d let me crash at her house, so the trip to see the second show was a fun adventure.
Having spent essentially my entire life listening to the eleven original ELO records, and knowing all of them by heart – even the crappy songs on Secret Messages or On the Third Day – there was a sense that this show would bring one aspect of my life, and my career, full circle. I’d started off listening to A New World Record around 1978, and now, exactly forty years later, I’d finally be adding ELO to the very very long list of artists I’ve seen live. Interestingly, I’d seen ELO Part Two in 1998, at exactly the midpoint in this timeline. With four important classic-era members in that band (Bevan, Groucutt, Kaminsky, and Clark) ELO Part Two had much more ELO DNA in the band than Jeff Lynne’s ELO does, even if Jeff is absolutely and inarguably the only completely indispensable member of ELO. And with Tandy missing from the 2018 shows, there was definitely a sense that I was essentially going to see an ELO cover band.
But Lynne and his well-rehearsed team of professionals delivered a tight show consisting of seventeen ELO classics, plus the traditional Roll Over Beethoven cover, and a Traveling Wilburys tune. The U.S. tour was slightly pared down from the twenty-four song set list heard at the 2016/2017 shows. The 2018 gigs featured more or less the same set list, but subtracted five songs. U.S. audiences this year missed out on Xanadu, Last Train to London, Prologue/Twilight, and Ma-Ma-Ma Belle. Oddly, the immortal Strange Magic hasn’t been played since the 2014/2015 gigs.
Watching videos of very early ELO (back when Roy Wood was still in the band), we see some of the lads wearing animal masks (bizarre, and hard to find justification for), while the string players ran around the stage, rockin’ out just like the guitarists. It’d be unfair to expect that level of goofiness or raw energy from a show today; Lynne is now almost 71, and his players all appear to be in their forties or fifties. And let’s face it: so is his audience. There were almost no people who appeared to be much younger than their late thirties at the Chicago show. In New York a few more people seemed to have brought their teenage kids, but certainly there were very few people present under the age of forty whose presence was anything other than a placating gesture to their parents. The Chicago audience spent most of the show seated, which was a little frustrating; I wanted to be on my feet and grooving a little bit. The New Yorkers were better about that: all of old folk sat down to rest during the ballads, but were up on our feet for at least two-thirds of the show. Comparing this to the rock shows of my youth where the whole audience would be standing on our seats, dancing in the aisles and making a ruckuss, seeing the Electric Light Orchestra was an experience closer to seeing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra than to being at a rock concert. But, I’m positive that a lot of the audience preferred it that way. After all, it’s fair to say that most of the people present weren’t operating at the energy levels we were enjoying in the 1970s or 1980s.
Given that the band are older and the audience is older, the lack of energy coming off the stage was noticeable. Lynne’s large and very professional band delivered note-perfect renditions of nineteen songs. All of them were flawlessly performed, sounding precisely like they did on the classic records. None had the arrangements updated, and none were extended into longer jams or condensed into medleys. There was no showy virtuosity, and none of the members got to take a longer solo or improvise at any moment in the show. Note-perfect classic ELO, just how we remembered it from our youth, except played by different people. Like, again, an extremely well rehearsed ELO cover band.
The light show was great, and the five rear-projection banners behind the band were filled with predictable if quite welcome images of (are you sitting down?) outer space. If Jeff forgot a few lyrics here or there, or his voice is becoming too tired to deliver a full set every night, his backing singers were there to cover for him (one of the singers showed a bit of range by covering vocal parts originally sung by three rather diverse singers: Roy Wood, Kelly Groucutt, and Roy Orbison). If Lynne’s guitar playing isn’t as strong as it once was, his two guitarists have him covered. Even the mighty Richard Tandy required no less than three keyboard players on stage to adequately replace him (ok, one of them was doubling the string players to beef them up…). I’d be lying if I didn’t say I got a little choked up during the Chicago show, and only slightly less so at the identical New York gig. Even having spent about $400 on the two tickets, I’m absolutely glad I went.
And yet I wonder what the show would have been like if Bevan, Tandy, or even Mik Kaminsky (the longest-standing of ELO’s many string players) were there (Groucutt died in 2009). Would we have seen tired old men dialing in a barely adequate performance? Or would the show have contained more of the strange magic that made ELO great, rather than the cold precision of Jeff Lynne’s crack team of hired guns? We’ll never know.
Having seen other reunions of old-timers in the past, I’ve experienced shows put on by people who were better off not having bothered, and I have also seen some surprisingly satisfying performances. Speaking strictly about bands whose entire classic line-up was present, I caught the first of several Wire reunions in 1987, and the original Buzzcocks way back in 1989. But these shows happened only a handful of years after the dissolution of bands that are a generation younger than ELO. Putting a little more time and life experience into the breakup/reunion gap, I’ve seen the original X a few times, a Bauhaus reunion in 1998 that was memorable, and one-off tour from the original Gang of Four lineup in 2005 that was very good. Ultravox reunited a few years ago, but didn’t tour the U.S.; their show on video was decent (but their album sucked). The Fixx are still completely intact and were satisfying to see live (for free at a street festival no less) in 2012. A Dead Can Dance show in 2005 was a disaster, as was the second Bauhaus reunion that year. But certainly, none of these projects had ever toured arenas. Bands with most of the original lineup are legion; I’ve seen 80% of Devo three or four times, I saw the original Duran Duran once in 1984, and various combinations of that band several times since then. There are plenty of other partially-intact classic bands. Lots. Some of them do bring the goods.
But these are bands associated with the punk, post-punk, and new wave genres. What about 1970s stadium rock? As I said in the beginning of this essay, I moved away from that fairly early on in life, and there aren’t that many bands of that era that I care about. And they’re also all even older than the new wavers, so there are even fewer of them alive. Maybe Rush. But they just disbanded, like last year. I said I wasn’t going to speak of Kiss again, but in 2000, I saw the sixth-to-last show their original lineup ever did. That was pretty spectacular, but again, that was nearly twenty years ago. What kind of energy are they bringing now (and with Peter Criss and Ace Frehley gone, why bother)? So I’m writing off stadium rock as an option.
Of bands that I liked in my youth, who might tour large venues, and who are all still alive, I’m struggling to come up with any further names that would reel me in. Every band I can think of has either lost members to the reaper, or they’ve already reunited, for good or for ill. Except one. After a fair amount of reflection, there is only one band – one – that I can think of who have never reunited, who are all alive, who could fill large venues, and who I would go to see for sure. One band.
The name of this band is Talking Heads.
With the exception of their 2002 show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, they haven’t gigged since 1984. I have almost all of their records, and I enjoy them. I’d go to a Heads reunion with some level of enthusiasm. All four members have remained active in music, and the quality of classic-era Talking Heads shows is semi-legendary (see their film Stop Making Sense, which is objectively a strong contender for being the best concert film ever). But there are two things at hand here: Talking Heads have been offered a lot of money to tour many times in the past 34 years and have always turned it down. Seems unlikely that they’d suddenly start accepting offers. And more crucially to the point of this essay, I just don’t have the emotional connection to that band that I have with ELO.
So, disregarding the complete lack of original members currently performing in ELO (aside from Jeff Lynne of course), the antiseptic quality of the slick performances, and my recent musings on Lynne’s repetitive themes and lack of ambitions as a lyricist, seeing a version of ELO this summer was truly some sort of bookend in my life as a rock music fan. It’s vastly overstating the case to say that my interest in the rock music of the past and present has suddenly reached a standstill and that I’ll be burning all of my old records… and CDs… and digital files… but it feels like there’s nowhere left for my interest in this sort of music to go from here. I’ve come full circle somehow, and seeing these ELO shows this summer definitely felt like I was reaching the end of a very long phase in my life.
What’s next?
What the hell does Dazzler have to do with Einsturezende Nuebauten?
Everything!
and
Nothing.
Roll with it.
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As promised - or threatened - last time, a bit of a break is in order before I continue my march through the classic rock canon ....from a post punk perspective. May is interlude month. Below is something I wrote for an art history course. We had to discuss an early artistic influence and track how our perspective on it has changed over time. Felt like it was worth sharing with a wider audience.
---
1.
As a teen in the 1980s, my circle of friends were drawn toward post-punk music. This style flourished during the late 1970s and early 1980s, feeding upon the new energy of punk, but funneling it into music somewhat more concerned with quality musicianship, a wider sonic palette, and lyrics leaning toward the political or self-reflective. Bands like Gang of Four, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and Wire could be fairly abrasive at times, but this artfully moderated dissonance felt appropriate to disaffected youth of the 1980s who sought to reject what Bruce Springsteen and Phil Collins were producing.
German ensemble Einsturzende Neubauten emerged around this time. They took discord to unheard of levels. Their instruments included sledgehammers on metal, chainsaws on oil drums, and guitars abused in ways that would make Les Paul weep. All of my friends had Neubauten records, but no one ever listened to them. Neubauten were just too relentlessly abrasive, even for their target audience. They had dispensed with harmony, melody, rhythm, or any sense of musical structure, and were making music by applying power tools to chunks of concrete salvaged from collapsed buildings.
Nonetheless, this band became a symbol for a subculture across the western world. It was less about Neubauten's art, and more about what their work represented. Neubauten's distinctive logo was 
Yes! For her third consecutive appearance - all completely unrelated to this blog - we have Dazzler again, this time rocking backing vocals with her pal Vanessa, and discovering the wonders of technology. They better bring Dazz into the Marvel Cinematic Universe soon, or it's gonna be clobbering time.
From Dazzler #17, ©1982 Marvel.
And now:
The larch.
The.
Larch.
Or, at least Van Halen, anyway.
Off the top of my head, what do I know about Van Halen? During his heyday, guitarist Eddie Van Halen was considered to be one of the greatest instrumental performers in popular music, while his frontman David Lee Roth was equally as well known for either his charisma or his juvenile antics, depending on your perspective. Eddie's brother Alex was in the band, along with Michael Anthony (maybe? Not sure). Not bad; it's been a long time (if ever) since I've been able to name all of the members in one of the bands I'm discussing here. Roth eventually left the band, to be replaced by Sammy Hagar, and then some other guy.
Many of their songs are familiar to me; albums like 1984 and its many hits were inescapable when I was in middle school. But as commonly stated within this series, I went really far out of my way to avoid Van Halen and their fans, after throwing my lot in with a group of friends more attuned to Talking Heads, Japan, David Bowie, and Joy Division. I've never heard a Van Halen album all the way through. Their big 1980s pop-oriented hits are still of no interest (i.e. "Jump" or "Hot For Teacher"), but perhaps their first album (which also had no shortage of well-known songs such as "Runnin' with the Devil", "Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love", and "Jamie's Cryin'") will reveal something worthwhile.
Also, many people have told me that I look like Eddie Van Halen, and/or David Johansen from New York Dolls. So if you want to know what I looked like as a younger guy, imagine some mash up of these two, but without Eddie's shaggy mane or David's glam-rock makeup. Can't say that I see the resemblance, or that I ever got into either of these lads' bands, but whatever.
As always, I'm listening to this album for the first time ever, and have not done any research at all before listening today. Going in with nothing but the meager info about this artist that has leaked into my brain over the course of life, I'm taking it at face value. The writing is entirely my tabula rasa stream-of-consciousness first impressions, written in real-time as the album played, and was only edited for spelling and clarity. Since I've got three decades as a sound engineer under my belt, I'll be listening equally to the merits of the music and the quality of the sound production. For more info about the mission and background of this series, see C O N T E X T (post #00).
Van Halen
Van Halen (1978)
Version: Warner Brothers HDCD, 9 47737-2 (2000)
Runnin' with the Devil
The sound effect at the beginning of the song is totally gratuitous. The big spacey album opening is something that E.L.O. started doing, and soon everyone else started ripping them off until it became a mandatory fixture for late 1970s records. This is a super-perfunctory effort; it just sounds like a slowed-down backward cymbal or something. But then we get into a moderate throbby groove with a little swagger. Not a lot. Just enough. This record sounds pretty good for a 1978 debut. The reverb sounds nice, but it's a little heavy for its era. I don't want to say Van Halen were purposely predicting the reverb-drenched 1980s; its more like they just got lucky. The record sounds a little lopsided with the guitars all panned left. Since there isn't a second guitar, or any keys, or horns, there's nothing much happening in the right side. But then these little mini-solos come in on the right, much too loud and seemingly out of nowhere. It's a bad mix decision on a record that's otherwise pretty good sounding. As a song, I find this one uninspired but adequately crafted.
Eruption
I seem to recall that this instrumental guitar solo is what first gained Eddie his reputation for popularizing the hammer-on technique that made him famous. He certainly demonstrates it confidently, and also abuses the crud out of his whammy bar. It's a bold move to put 102 seconds of mostly-unaccompanied guitar wankery (there are a few staccato hits from the rhythm section) as the second track on a debut album. This is the kind of thing that would normally be buried somewhere on side two as filler; any sane band would have followed "Devil" up with another strong rock song. Actually, any sane band would have just included "Eruption" as a solo section within a complete song. But this risk seems to have worked; Eddie definitely got people's attention. Masturbating in public has that effect. "Eruption"? This should have been called "Erection" because it's nothing but the man wanking (ok, fine, rather skillfully wanking).
You Really Got Me
Can't go wrong with a Kinks kover. But we're three songs into this record and so far we only have one proper Van Halen song. How strapped for material were these guys? Did they get signed before they'd written more than a handful of songs? This time, Roth's densely layered backing vocals take up space in the right channel, balancing the guitar a bit, but the record still feels lopsided to me. Eddie does another solo here, and once again it was probably pretty radical and inventive for it's day. Having recently listened to Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and (a bit further back) Aerosmith and Uriah Heep, it is crystal clear that Eddie's guitar style was really fresh in 1978. His playing was aped mercilessly for the next decade (or two) (or three) until the majority of the youth audience stopped focusing on rock music. Roth gets into some auto-asphyxiative vocal histrionics after the guitar solo and then we're over and out.
Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love
Finally, another actual Van Halen song. There's this weird slap echo in the right channel. It's like a woody eighth-note delay on the snare. It's distracting. While this band are rockin' out, I just picture David Lee Roth in spandex mugging for a camera, being goofy. I wonder if I'd hear this record differently if I didn't know what this guy looked like. I can't really take him seriously. Eddie stomps on a flange pedal in the bridge. That's not a real tape-flange. It's easy to tell. Too controlled, too precise, and too trebly. Doubled guitar solo in each channel. Eddie absolutely shines on this record. His rhythm tone is razor-sharp (if a bit brittle at times) and his many leads are mapping new territory. And there's no one competing with him. Just a bass player and a drummer holding down the beat leaving Eddie and David Lee to take turns showing off in very different ways. Neither of these guys got enough attention as children. Their mamas ain't talkin' 'bout love enough when they were kiddies.
I'm the One
This one is a fairly frenzied rocker, fast and a little less controlled than the others. Do I hear a double-kick drum? That was also a fairly new trick in 1978. Later acts would EQ all the low-end out of the double-kick so it was easier to really hear the rapid attacks of the beater on the drum head. That clicky kick sound of the 1980s came from here, and is still used in speed metal. Hey wait, a nearly a capella do-wop section comes out of nowhere in the bridge. That's kind of fun, then we're right back into the chaos. Seems like the band are having fun. Overall, on this record they sound tight and rehearsed. They don't have a lot of songs, but it seems that they've played the ones they do have enough times that they're locked in. I don't enjoy them, but it is clear why this band became huge, they had their shit together.
Jamie's Cryin'
Another bit of swagger in this groove. One of the problems with hard rock or metal guitar is that the leads and solos are often more preoccupied with demonstrating dexterity than with developing melody. So few rock guitar solos are actually interesting as music. Come to think of it, all the riffs from this record are already fading; none of them stick with me. Eddie brings the innovative technique, but the hooks in the songs all come from David Lee's vocals. There's no iconic guitar riff on this album like "Smoke on the Water" or "Iron Man" (as heard in recent posts for this series), or (say) "Back in Black" by AC/DC. But this song's riffage comes closest to being memorable. And once again, the right channel is used for secondary guitar parts, while Eddie is spending most of his time on the left. Honestly a little Hammond or a sax or something would help round this band's sound out a bit. But I can't see Eddie giving up any ground.
Atomic Punk
This one is a bit heavier, a little harder, kind of spirited. More of the same otherwise. Kind of fun. I'm just listening, there's nothing new to add. David's screams are funny. None of these songs are over four minutes. Was this even legal for bands in this style in the 1970s? A bit like Boston (previous post), these guys seemed laser-focused on the charts, and got there.
Feel Your Love Tonight
Yeah, this is the song that wasn't a hit. There are eleven songs on this record: eight shortish Van Halen songs, a guitar solo, and two covers. All eight of the originals are attempts at commerciality, and three of them succeeded. The rest are the almost-rans. Still, three hits off this record is nothing to complain about. There's not much to say about this music; there just isn't much substance to it. Same thing: Roth is having fun goofing off, Eddie is biding his time between solos, the other guys are enjoying the ride.
Little Dreamer
I'll reiterate that this record is recorded well even if I don't agree with the lopsided mix and occasional excess reverb. The mixes are consistent though; every song has the same tonal balance and the same soundstage. They got tones they liked and then laid it down eleven times. This doesn't sound like a first album. The band are very confident, and there was a budget. It's a little brittle sometimes though; I'd warm it up a notch.
Ice Cream Man
If I'd had to guess in advance which Tom Waits song* was most likely to be covered by Van Halen, this probably would have been it, largely due to the raunchy double-entendres. Here's that warmth: a woody acoustic guitar and vocal. Rhythm section took a coke break. Until halfway through... then it's suddenly Van Halen again. Tom's version definitely didn't have this solo on it. In my post about The Eagles, I mentioned that Tom Waits probably makes more money from the many, many people who cover his 1970s songs than he does from sales of his own albums. We can calculate how much Tom made from Van Halen's cover. When this album was released in 1978, the songwriter's publishing royalty rate was 2.75 cents per song (the performer gets a different rate, see below). Having written one song from the first Van Halen album, Tom got 2.75 cents for every copy Van Halen sold. By law, this rate has increased steadily over the years; it is 9.1 cents today. This album has sold 15.5 million copies. That means at 2.75 cents per copy, Tom made $426,250. At 9.1 cents per copy, that's $1,410,500. Thus, his real pay has been somewhere between those two numbers, but probably closer to the low end, since presumably the record was selling better when it was newer. He probably has to split that money 50/50 with his publisher, and then pay income taxes on his cut. At the very least, he's netted $159,843 (half the lowest possible publishing rate minus a total guess of 25% tax rate), but it's probably a bit more than that since some portion of the records were sold after the royalty rate started going up.
Compare that to how much Tom made for selling copies of his own Closing Time (1973), the album "Ice Cream Man" appeared on. For performing on that record, Tom got a rate negotiated with the record label. A good guess is 8% of the wholesale price; that was common for young emerging artists. Albums cost about $7 then, so figure a $3.50 wholesale price. The record went gold, meaning it has sold between 500,000 and 999,999 copies. At an 8% rate for 500k copies at $3.50 per copy, that's $140,000. He also got that 2.75 cents for writing the songs, times 12 songs on the album. So that's another 33 cents per album, times 500k albums, or $165k (to be divided by half again, as above). That's a total of about $222,500 for writing and performing on 500k copies, double that if he sold closer to 999,999, and remember that he's earned more for copies sold more recently. From that money, he had to pay the record label back for recording costs, his manager took a cut (10% usually), and he had to pay income tax. It's hard to definitively state whether he made more money from Van Halen covering one song than he did from selling copies of his own album, but consider that "Ice Cream Man" is blues standard now, many people have performed it, and Tom is making cash from every one of them. So for sure he's doing better from other people playing it than he himself has. (Also, that song came out in 1973, so all this theoretical cash has been trickling in slowly for 49 years).
How much has Van Halen made from Van Halen (1978)? They got zero for writing "Ice Cream Man" (because Tom wrote it), but if they got an 8% performance rate in 1978 (a reasonable guess), when records cost closer to $9 ($4.50 wholesale), that's about $5,580,000. Subtract 10% for the manager, subtract recording costs (reported at $40k for this record), and divide by four (each of the four band members would get a quarter of the net total), and we're at about a million bucks per guy after taxes. Plus the publishing money for the songs they did write themselves, but this gets complicated because each band member might own a different percentage of each song.
On Fire
Another uptempo rocker, the band pull out all the stops here and finish the album on a relatively thrilling note. But the fade at the end is tragic. This one really really needed a big finish and a cold ending; all the others on this album had one except "Jamie's Cryin'", which probably needed its fade for radio play. Van Halen's debut shows them tight, confident, and forward-thinking right out of the gate. They sound like a band who know each other's idiosyncrasies, and are able to function effectively as a unit. Having heard this album for the first time, I can't say I'm a fan, but it does show a high level of craftsmanship, and perhaps art in Eddie's guitar innovations (which I don't ever need to hear again).
________
*Post-posting research:
Yeah, I thought the lyrics on "Ice Cream Man" were different from Tom's, but that's artistic license for you. Turns out that Tom was credited with writing "Ice Cream Man" on Closing Time, but there is also an older and conceptually really similar song called "Ice Cream Man", written by John Brim. So that brick of text about royalties? Well, Tom didn't make squat from Van Halen, but John Brim did. But as an example of how this crap works it holds up in theory so I'm'ma leave it up there for you. At least six other bands have written songs called "Ice Cream Man", but the similarity between the Waits and Brim versions is worth noting; they might have both pinched it from some traditional blues thing that's been passed around like a social disease since the late 19th century century. Like a "Stagger Lee" kind of thing (look it up, I'm out of here).
Song for the IFHTB mix tape:
I'm going to go for something obscure and loose. "Atomic Punk" or "On Fire" both sound like the band are having fun. Another quick listen... "Atomic Punk".
Next:
Genesis, coming April 15, 2022
This image has nothing to do with this post. But it's so nice to see an artist giving props to her sound engineer. Comic books are not reality. In reality, no fucking artist ever gives props to their sound engineer. But sound engineers always totally imagine they're either crushing someone's head or tweaking their nipple when giving the "OK" sign.
From Dazzler #16, ©1982 Marvel Comics.
And now on to our post...
Off the top of my head, what do I know about Boston? This band are oft-discussed in sound engineering circles: apparently band leader Tom Scholz recorded most of the band's debut as essentially a solo act in a home studio, playing most of the instruments himself. That sort of thing is commonplace today, but it is impressive for 1975; at that time the technology to get the results he did was difficult and expensive to come by. Some other musicians hung out at a pro recording facility to appease Scholz's record label, fooling the label into thinking they were a full band making the record in the approved studio while Scholz secretly did his thing at home. Eventually, Scholz got another guy to sing on his completed instrumentals, so the album was effectively made as a duo. Lots of people have been in the touring band over the years, but it's really Scholz's thing. This record sold something like 17 million copies, but Boston has only made a few further records. The only song I know off-hand is "More Than A Feeling", but I suspect that I'll recognize a few of the others. That's all I've got, but it's more than I know about most of the other bands subjected to my scrutiny for this project.
As always, I'm listening to this album for the first time ever, and have not done any research at all before listening today. Going in with nothing but the meager info about this artist that has leaked into my brain over the course of life, I'm taking it at face value. The writing is entirely my tabula rasa stream-of-consciousness first impressions, written in real-time as the album played, and was only edited for spelling and clarity. Since I've got three decades as a sound engineer under my belt, I'll be listening equally to the merits of the music and the quality of the sound production. For more info about the mission and background of this series, see C O N T E X T (post #00).
Boston
Boston (1976)
Version: Epic (Japan) 25•8P-5192 (1989)
More Than A Feeling
Yeah, this does sound damned good for a home recording. I'd turn the bass guitar down a notch. I wonder how much of the legend about the making of this record is strictly true. Stories tend to get exaggerated, blown-up, and mutated over time. A lot of these lyrics are pretty unintelligible. All these years I had no idea what he was singing, other than something about a Marianne. I used to tour with a certain rock band whose singer was named Mari Anne. Our road manager used to sing her name using the melody from this song. He'd never just speak her name. He'd always sing it, even if he was saying her name in the middle of a sentence. So this song. It's a competent arena rock song. It has enough changes to keep it interesting and enough dynamics to make the big parts seem big. Well recorded, mostly well mixed. Catchy hook. I've just heard it too damned many times to remain as objective as I try to be for this writing series.
Peace Of Mind
OK, yeah, this one sounds familiar too. Not surprising. I want to say that "the band" are doing a spirited take here, but I guess it's all Scholz, playing all the instruments, recording them layer by layer? Well maybe it's all the more impressive that he made it sound so energetic. I have personally recorded music as both an engineer and an artist in this way, and it's hard to find a way to replace the spirit of a group of players vibing off each other. That's a really big deal. Can't overstate that. The guitar tones Scholz gets on this record are so much better than the ones I recently heard on more guitar-focused bands like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. He's got them dialed in. But - ack - those parallel 4ths (or 5ths) here. Can't escape them. Maybe that's the single best part about having rejected this whole style of music as a youth. None of the punk, post-punk, synth pop, or new wave canon uses this guitar technique at all. But in these classic rock records, it's everywhere. That guitar playing style is the line in the sand.
Foreplay / Long Time
Ha, I know this one too. Used to hear it on AOR radio when it was current... and then for years afterward until I switched off any radio frequency higher than 92.1 FM. It was all about the left end of the dial - college radio and NPR - for me from my early teens onward. That clavinet riff in "Foreplay" is ballsy. Ok, at about 2m 30s this "Foreplay" instrumental ends, and we're into a song. Yes of course I know this one too. This album really did spawn a lot of hits. They're a bit formulaic; all three sound kind of samey. Big harmonies, handclaps, acoustic guitar accents, powerful power chords, and some keys for accents. Maybe the reason that I didn't remember having heard so much of this record is because the songs are kind of indistinguishable. It's like one long rock song, custom-tailored to be broken into chunks, each of which was lined up and aimed like a "la-zher" at the 1976 pop charts. Well, with each new take on the same old formula, Scholz kept hitting bulls eyes, so good for him?
Rock & Roll Band
Are we going to hear the same well-crafted song a fourth time? This one is not sounding familiar so far, except in the sense that it sounds like the other three, but faster. This lyric sucks. The "story of the band" lyric is almost as lame as the "two lovers on the run" lyric. I've mentioned the later trope a few times in previous posts. Haha, in the third verse, our vocalist sings "sign a record company contract" in a falsetto voice that we haven't heard from him before. That's because said record company has his balls in a vice.
Smokin'
This one is has looser boogie woogie beat with a little southern vibe, and a vocal that is significantly more buried in the mix than the other songs. This one seems like filler; it's clear that they didn't spend as much time on it. Are they singing about weed? Scandalous! What is Scholz's main instrument? His drumming is uncomplicated but solid; his bass playing is perfunctory. Come to think of it his keys and guitar work are also both fairly nondescript, but by no means poor. He's good at playing everything, but he isn't outstanding on any particular instrument. The solo section toward the end has a few surprises in it though, that's kind of fun to listen to.
Hitch A Ride
Seems like they front-loaded the hits on side one of this record. Wonder how many people played side one to death and played side two like twice, ever. Spreading the hits out is a less fan-friendly way to sequence an album, but it's a more art-friendly approach. Make the kids listen to all the other stuff between the hits. This tune has a bit of a gentler feel, until it explodes into a power chord and Hammond freak-out. There is nothing about this album that sucks. But by the same token, it feels a little calculated and kind of bland. I'm starting to appreciate some of the artists who take more risks. There have been some phenomenal failures on some of the records I've listened to for this project, but ultimately, I suppose I admire the bands who at least tried to stretch out a little bit and do something new. Boston were aiming at the top of the charts, they got there, and they got there with music that is competent but not impressive. The record shows a high level of craftsmanship, but very little art. There isn't a single musical risk on this entire album, nothing that reaches for genius (with the definition of genius being: a truly original thought). A bit like The Eagles (see my post on them), in that sense.
Something About You
All right. I'm done. The big parallel 4ths (or 5ths) right from the get-go. Make it stop. Have I heard this song before? Does it sound familiar because it was a hit, or because it just sounds effectively identical to all of the hits? Same as it ever was: spirited take but somehow also passionless, skillfully workmanlike in execution.
Let Me Take You Home Tonight
This herky-jerk rhythm in the intro of this song threatens to dare to be different. Naturally, they get over it pretty quick and go into the ninth and last identical pop song for this record. Parallel 4ths (or 5ths) and all of the other tropes from this band's limited bag of tricks are dutifully trotted out.
One of the benefits of having four or five (or more) people in a band is that there are more people to come up with diverse and challenging ideas. Even if we have one person who writes all the songs, the other players will flesh out the material with their own little details, contributing the peculiarities of their individual playing styles. Scholz really needed to have some other people's personalities on this record. It feels too homogenized. There's no one for him to spark off of, to push him into new directions. People who have devoted themselves to the mastery of one particular instrument could have brought more innovative or surprising moments to the music than one person who is "good enough" on many instruments (Scholz). With Scholz on every instrument, the songs become super-predictable after hearing just a few of them, because we've only got one person's ideas across the board. On top of that, there was clearly no effort being made to expand the boundaries of music, at all. Not one note on this record is anywhere except exactly where we expect it to be. It's a snoozer aimed at the masses, and the work of a craftsman of great skill, but not a true artist (if we concur with the idea that true art is not so different from true genius in that it must always surprise us).
Song for the IMDB mix tape:
We ought to go with "More Than a Feeling", but maybe "Something About You" would be good because it sounds like one of the hits but I'm not as sick of hearing it.
Next:
Van Halen, coming April 01, 2022
...it makes me think of stoner girls in the 1970s with candles and incense and floaty scarves like Stevie Nicks and a boyfriend with a bitchin' Camaro who can barely grow a moustache. Roach clips with little synthetic feathers on the end. Bell bottoms. Feathered hair. Blue eye shadow. All that shit.
Ok, but should I listen to it? I can't take this seriously. This cover is just so funny to me. Also, according to a dozen listicles on the internet, this album, Burn, and a record called Fireball usually flip back and forth in the #3 and #4 positions in the Deep Purple catalog, while the records In Rock and Machine Head usually alternate in the #1 and #2 positions, with In Rock being #1 slightly more often. The cover of In Rock shows the lads carved into Mount Rushmore. So lame! What a bunch of doofii.
Wait, I just remembered: "Smoke On The Water". Yes, of course. That's Deep Purple. That's a huge one. Which album is that on? Machine Head. Ok, Machine Head is just a tad below In Rock in the rankings, but we'll give it a go. It's always good to have at lest one familiar song when I do these things.
As always, I'm listening to this album for the first time ever, and have not done any research at all before listening today, aside from picking a record to hear. Going in with nothing but the meager info about this artist that has leaked into my brain over the course of life, I'm taking it at face value. The writing is entirely my tabula rasa stream-of-consciousness first impressions, written in real-time as the album played, and was only edited for spelling and clarity. Since I've got three decades as a sound engineer under my belt, I'll be listening equally to the merits of the music and the quality of the sound production. For more info about the mission and background of this series, see C O N T E X T (post #00).
Deep Purple
Machine Head (1972)
Version: Warner Brothers (Japan) WPCR 12255 (1996 / 2006)
Highway Star
Driving beat with tight playing right off the bat. Can't help comparing this record to last post's Black Sabbath experience; after just moments it is clear that Machine Head is already a better record than Sabbath's Paranoid. The difference in base-level musical competency is clear, and the production is better too. Good driving rock with a dirty Hammond and some grit in the singer's voice. That's Gillan. Lyrics about a girl and a car call back to the Springsteen post last month. The song's bridge has some interesting effects and an organ solo (mixed a little loud, and mostly consisting of arpeggios). Band remain tight and this take seems energetic and committed as we go into a guitar solo that's also placed a little clumsily in the mix. It's more interesting than the Hammond solo was, in that it's at least somewhat melodic... until the second half, during which the player resorts to weedly-weedly arpeggios even more egregiously than the Hammond player did. Yes, it's fast but it's less interesting than the earlier, less manually challenging part. Song finishes with a concert-style ending after six minutes; not sure this song needed to endure for quite this long, but I wasn't bored. This song could be paired up with almost anything from Springsteen's Born to Run album, plus Rush's "Red Barchetta", and Queen's "I'm In Love With My Car" (and probably a bunch of others) as a 1970s homage to the waning years of 1950s car culture. Worshiping these machines and forming some kind of emotional bond with them seems so out of date today.
Maybe I'm A Leo
Little bit of a cocky mid-tempo groove here. This song just kind of chugs along. Does its thing. Playing and recording are both competent, nothing wrong with this record, but not enough right. Once again, the dirty Hammond solo, and interesting kind of tremolo processing on what might be a Rhodes solo. Good to see the keyboard player getting some space to shine in music this heavy. Heavy? It's really not that heavy at all, by today's standards. Just sounds like basic rock. But I guess in 1972, this was a bit weighty. That Hammond is really adding a lot of the weight. It's so distorted, in a nice way, but it's taking up more space in the mix than the guitars. Keyboards really got pushed out of metal music for a long time, but in this case, this Hammond is doing more to fill up these mixes with crunchy goodness than the guitars are, byny a wide margin. Then, once again, we have a guitar solo that begins with some feel and some melody, and then fades. Hm, I kinda wanted to see where it went. A great solo should reach a peak, a conclusion. But we just get a fade.
Super trite, low-effort lyric:
"Acting like a fool, I had to make her cry
Maybe I'm a Leo but I ain't a lion
I'm hurtin' for her so bad
I want her now".
Pictures Of Home
Back to a more energetic tune. The organ player switches from a moderately gritty tone to a ridiculously distorted one at key moments; he's threatening to drown out the singer in the second chorus, and even fights with the guitarist during the solo. Back off the otherwise effective Hammond, guys! Drummer is on point, and drums are recorded as well as can be expected for 1972. We're a couple of years out from the golden age of drum recording, which coincided with 24-track tape becoming standard just a little while after this record was made. The narrator of this song is at the top of a mountain, cold and alone, missing home. Seems like a song about loneliness, but verse three introduces some further themes:
"Here in this prison
Of my own making
Year after day, I have grown
Into a hero
But there's no worship
Where have they hidden my throne?"
Ah, the old "it's lonely to be successful" trope. Yes indeed, it's rough and isolating to be famous. Well, watch what you wish for, you just might get it. This song is another tightly performed rocker, but it throws some surprises at us toward the end. An organ solo is overdubbed atop the original organ (and guitars) giving us several layers of distorted Hammond; we don't hear that very often. Then: a bass solo. No. Ack! It's only eight bars long, but is there a more cliched bad idea than a bass solo? This leads into a little bridge, a build, a pause... leaves us hanging in an effective way... and then into another guitar solo to fade. Once again, this song needed to climax, not fade. Otherwise, there are enough little changes and surprises to keep this one interesting, even if the lyric is a bit trite.
Never Before
Funky, herky-jerk intro groove gives way to a pretty straight-forward rocker with few surprises, but nothing embarrassing about it. Once again: this lyric. Charitably, it may be construed as simple and heartfelt, very emotionally exposed... or it can be considered super-low-effort. How long did it take our lyricist to come up with:
"Somebody, somebody
Come to my side
I'm tired, I'm crying
I'm sick inside
My woman, that woman
Just wasn't right
Help me, now
Please, my friend
I never felt so bad before
Never, never before"
I mean, we've all felt this way, but these guys are reasonably decent musicians, so a little more ambition with the words would have gone a long way toward elevating this music. Did Gillan improvise these live while recording a first take, and then just leave 'em as-is? These words feel like someone's first effort at writing a song... ever. Any fourteen-year-old with the tiniest fledgling ability for self-criticism would have taken a look at this and thought "yeah, maybe I can do better than that".
Smoke On The Water
This guitar riff. Nothing short of iconic. What are the top ten legendary rock guitar riffs of all time? This one must be on that list. The band knew it too. At the top of the song they play it over and over with very little else going on - like a freakin' manifesto - for almost a full minute. It comes back a few times later in the song as an instrumental refrain. This is yet another song that's been bouncing around in the background noise of my life since I was old enough to know what music was. It's always just sort of been there. But like just about all of the other bands discussed in this project, I've been doing my best to ignore it for the past four-plus decades. Until today, I never listened to the words, at all. These lyrics? Are they true? It seems like it's a narrative of a memorable event during the making of this record. It's true that the Rolling Stones had a mobile recording truck that they leased out. Did the band really witness the burning of a lakeside casino during a Zappa concert while making this record in Switzerland with the Stones' truck? The song is a bit longer than it needs to be. They get a whole lot of mileage out of their riff. Weird phase-flange on the drums at the end. Cool.
Lazy
Are we in church here? Organ solo. Their Hammond is clean for once; good, you have to give us the clean version in order for the grit to have impact. And then... they fade in the grit, and some phase effects. Then we hear it clean again. Then dirty. Then clean. Someone was stoned, but it works. In concert, this 1m 23s Hammond intro probably lasts for like ten minutes as an extended solo. When the band finally kick in they screw around with some bluesy staccato crap for a bit, then finally move into a bluesy boogie-woogie groove. Couple of solos, and then another super-lame lyric fails to thrill us, accompanied by a twelve-bar blues groove from the rhythm section. This jam is 7m 21s and feels like album filler. They didn't have enough songs. Cranking out a generic blues thing to soak up part of side two is an all-too-common cop-out. Can't help but to point out that the song is called "Lazy". Yup. The last minute picks up the tempo and shows some spark, but still, this one is a big nope.
Space Truckin'
This song is a bit more lighthearted, a fun little rocker about partying in outer space. Hate to say it, but as goofy as the words are, they're still the most creative lyrics on this album.
"Well we had a lot of luck on Venus
We always had a ball on Mars
We meet with all the groovy people
We rocked the Milky Way so far"
Yeah... that's as good as this band can do, lyrically. Sorry. Gillan goes up into a shrieky falsetto for a few lines, a sound that would define metal music for the next twenty years. Gotta love the timbale (or just high toms?) solo out of nowhere. This 4m 32s song wears out its welcome a full minute before it ends; it was fun for a bit but doesn't know when to stop.
-------
Some post-posting research:
Of course, the "Smoke On The Water" saga actually happened. Crazy!
Song for the IFHTB mix tape:
Tricky. "Smoke on the Water" would be the obvious choice, but it's a bit long for a mix tape. It's tempting to go with "Pictures of Home" - trite lyric, bass solo, and all - but it's only 35 seconds shorter than "Smoke". Maybe a quick edit of one of these? Are there single versions out there?
Next:
Moody Blues, coming March 01, 2022
The source image for both of these covers was clearly the same. Look at them; the position of the fingers, and everything else. Even the negative space between the baby's left pinky and shoulder is the same shape. This is the same piece of art, re-purposed in two very different ways. And both of them are creepy as hell. There's got to be a story here, maybe this piece of art in its original unaltered form was famous in Thatcher's Britain. The Black Sabbath record is their album Born Again (1983). But Depeche Mode used this horrorshow first (1981) with the 12" version of their second-ever single, "New Life". These bands couldn't be more different. Aside from being British, I don't think anyone ever claimed that Black Sabbath and Depeche Mode had anything in common, whatsoever... and now they are forever united by deeply questionable choices in their album art.
OK, and now we present...
Black Sabbath
Paranoid (1970)
Version: Japanese SA-CD, UIGY-9034 (2010)
War Pigs
This title is famous, but this song doesn't seem familiar at all. We've got these big grindy chords played over a sort of loping rhythm section (really thin and badly recorded); then a siren comes in. This whole extended section feels like it's leading up to something, like this is not the song, it's a teaser. Not even an intro per se, just a kind of vamp while the band hunts for a song. I'm thinking that just the band name "Black Sabbath" was probably a huge contributing factor to the whole "Satanic Panic" thing in the 1970s and 1980s. Lots of bands got called out for their supposedly satanic content. There was no shortage of radio, television, and print hysteria over our kids being corrupted by the devil's music. While parents were on a witch hunt against the relentlessly wholesome Electric Light Orchestra for their supposed backward messages (the band responded by putting completely innocuous real ones on their next album) a band called Black Sabbath just seem to be screaming for the attention of parents and preachers to piss off. Ok, after this extended intro we get Ozzy singing nearly a capella lyrics that seem to be nearly a manifesto for this band:
"Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death's construction"
Got the checklist handy? We have witches, black masses, evil minds, sorcerers, death, destruction. It's all right there. Everything your parents and preachers are gonna hate. But Ozzy keeps singing, and it turns out the lyric is a very plainly worded screed against war. There's no poetry here, no metaphor, no subtext, no wordplay (I mean, he has already rhymed "masses" with... "masses". Nice one, Oz). He just says what's on his mind in a manner that couldn't be misconstrued by anyone:
"Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor"
Well, that's a message few parents or teachers or anyone remotely sane would actually disapprove of, unless your parents are these titular war pigs. Well played, Ozzy. Since we can't actually fault Black Sabbath's message, it seems that the people obsessed with saving our children had to pick on the band who wrote "Mr. Blue Sky" instead. What the fuck were they thinking? These religious-wrong nutjobs didn't have enough real social problems to tackle, so they went after music? All of this said, this song is pretty dull. Yeah, the guitars sound big, but the song is kind of tedious. Not a whole lot happens, and it's got no energy, no spark. It's got a lot of space, but not in a cool atmospheric way. More like a "we couldn't think of anything good to play" kind of way. This album is a cornerstone of metal, but the band just seem bored. There's very little of musical interest. The song is nearly eight minutes long, but what it has to say, musically or lyrically, is all said within three minutes. A pop-single edit wouldn't cut anything really important. The rhythm section is sloppy, as are synchronized guitar solos for the last two minutes. Around 7m 17s, the guitarists get sloppier, fall way out of sync, and then just give up. There may not be a more anti-climactic ending on record. Ha, at the end there's an effect where the tape speeds up. That's the best part of the song.
Paranoid
Is this the song during which Ozzy allegedly bites the heads off of live animals during concerts? Who knows if that actually happened. Probably not. Maybe they were props, fake animals. I can't be bothered to research that. This song is also pretty thin on ideas, but if you have little to say musically, it's best to play faster so the few ideas are closer together and seem like more ideas. I just made that up, but maybe I believe it. Man, for music that's supposed to make you want to pump your fist in the air, make devil horns with your fingers, break shit, and be mad, this is really kind of tepid. The band really sound like they're holding back. And they really just aren't very good players. There's a lot of slop here and the solos kind of suck. But wait, this guitar tone in the solo, it's kind of twisted. Honestly it sounds like something that early Devo would use (if the only Devo you know is "Whip It'" you have no idea... go listen to the album Duty Now For the Future). Might be an Electro-Harmonix Frequency Analyzer or some similarly obscure and arcanely designed guitar pedal. The mastering on this song is completely different from the rest of the album. Way bassier, with a low end murkiness that doesn't need to be there.
Planet Caravan
Ah fuck, a ballad. This is not what I want to hear this from this band. I'm really really shocked to discover that one of the records that birthed metal is so fucking boring to listen to. If this were a different band, I'd like the woody percussion on this song, and... oh.... wait. This is also interesting vocal processing. Sounds like maybe they ran his voice through a Leslie (the special type of loudspeaker usually used with Hammond organs) and some kind of filter. Wait, then there's some weird electronic effect. This is kind of trippy. I kinda like this actually. Completely not what I expected, at all, but these kinds of surprises are exactly why I'm doing this project. This almost sounds like Can or something. Longish guitar solo kind of sucks though. Go figure. Sounds like a totally different band, but one I like better. If they made a whole album like this, I'd be into it.
Iron Man
See, this is what I was looking for. This one brings that bombastic heavy power to the music. The sense of weight that gives this genre of music its name. The recording is better than on the other songs too. They spent more money on this one, it's easy to tell. They knew it was going to be the iconic one. But it's just as repetitive and thin on musical ideas as the others. Ozzy just sings along with this repetitive guitar riff, over and over, it doesn't develop. What is this song even about? Certainly not the titular super-hero. Seems like it's about a giant robot who was sent into space and has now returned as an enemy?
"He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
When he traveled time
For the future of mankind
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfold"
Maybe this is a metaphor for something, perhaps some kind of social isolation. Ozzy normally doesn't like to get that arty with his writing. He normally doesn't like to get arty at all. Is this lyric a rare example of euphemism from the Oz, or just something he found in an issue of Amazing Stories, transcribed for our pleasure? You decide. Ah, then this tempo-change mid-song. Things pick up, some new ideas come in. Bass player is reaching a bit, trying to do something more interesting, but struggling. Guitar solo is just as lame as the others. But again: some more ideas here: after going back to the main verse, there's another tempo thing, and then another whole new section. This is easily their most inventive song. I'm still amazed that the playing on this album sucks so bad, but this song is one of the tighter efforts.
Electric Funeral
Here's another war tune, this one appears to be describing an atomic bomb blast. Same as the others though: repetitive and simple. The arrangement gets so amateurish toward the middle, with some even messier playing as Ozzy repeats the title over and over. That part of the song feels more like a preview of some especially sloppy garage punk that would come along by the end of the decade.
Hand Of Doom
The biggest surprise on this record are how socially conscious the lyrics are. We've had at least two anti-war tunes so far, and now we're unambiguously warning kids away from drugs, during the peak of their era of glorification.
We get:
"First it was the bomb, Vietnam napalm
Disillusioning, you push the needle in
From life you escape, reality's that way
Colours in your mind, satisfy in time"
And soon:
"Oh you, you know you must be blind
To do something like this,
To take the sleep that you don't know
You're giving Death a kiss
Oh little fool now"
Maybe Ozzy's absolute refusal (or failure) to employ any sort of allegory in his music works in his favor here. These lyrics are too plain in their intent to miss. Fifty years ago this music may have seemed intolerably noisy and offensive to authority figures, but these lyrics are unimpeachably pro-social. It's like the band's name and all the dark imagery was there to lure the malcontented kids in, but then the record is almost as full of messages as positive as anything by the mostly-insufferable Howard Jones. Anyway, this is another long song (7m 8s) and it's boring as hell. The second biggest surprise on this record is how dull it is musically.
Rat Salad
This is a quick instrumental. Instrumentals are a bad idea for this band; they need Ozzy's words to add another layer of interest (such as it is) to partially bolster the instrumentalists' lack of musical invention. The drum solo in this song is one of the worst in history. It's just super lame. Rote and sloppy. And it lasts for nearly a minute of the 2m 30s song. Man...
Fairies Wear Boots
Alrighty. Fun delays on the guitar foreshadowing U2's The Edge, and then the album closer is about... well, let Ozzy say it:
"Yeah I looked through a window and surprised what I saw
A fairy with boots and dancin' with a dwarf,
Yeah, fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me
Yeah I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no lies
Yeah Fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me
I saw it, I saw it with my own two eyes".
This basically repeats for more than six minutes, until we get the big moral:
"So I went to the doctor
See what he could give me
He said "Son, son, you've gone too far.
'Cause smokin' and trippin' is all that you do."
Ok, yeah, whatever. Nothing new to say about this song. Same as the others. Inexplicably, the playing is a notch tighter. Wait, so is the mix. This whole song feels like it wasn't just placed last on the album, but recorded last too, and by the end these guys got warmed up and figured out how to play their instruments better. And they're sounding a little more inspired. Still not a great song, but why didn't they have their shit almost-together to this degree on the other songs? I'm also not crazy about the trite lyric, but musically, this is one of their better efforts. The fade-out at the end is lame though. They needed to just bring the song to a climax and end it properly.
___
Ok, I had to look a few things up after the fact. Yeah, Ozzy left the band eventually, and was replaced by Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan, who we'll be listening to next time. During their 1983-1984 tour, Black Sabbath also used Bev Bevan, drummer from Electric Light Orchestra. Maybe these rather different bands were in cahoots over the whole Satanic messages thing, or maybe its because both bands were from Birmingham. During that tour, there was a mix-up about the size needed for a Stonehenge set-piece, which directly inspired one of the most memorable gags in the rock-mockumentary film This Is Spinal Tap, released within a year of the tour's conclusion.
Song for the IFHTB mix tape:
It should be "Iron Man", but that one is too long for a mix, so we're going with "Paranoid", and maybe we'll hold "Planet Caravan" in reserve for a mix of trippy / ambient tunes.
Next:
Deep Purple, coming February 15, 2022
I Ain't The One
The first thing we learn on this record is that at least one band member can count to three, but apparently he couldn't manage four. Then we get backward drums. That's a surprise. Definitely unexpected. Turns out these backward drums continue playing through the whole song. They become gimmicky and annoying, and are often the loudest thing in the mix. This is a ham-fisted and clumsy use of a (usually) always welcome production trick. The normal drums stay buried in the mix, throwing it all off-kilter, mix-wise. This guitar work reminds me a lot of The Eagles. That is not a surprise. Almost completely expected. Vocalist is really buried in this mix; is it that he can't sing or is it that what he's saying isn't important? At 0:55 his voice suddenly and noticeably drops even lower, and stays there for the duration of the song. He mentions a gun at one point. I wonder how many of these songs will do so? So far these guys sound like a typical southern bar band. The playing is competent but not special. Song is completely forgettable.
Tuesday's Gone
By chance, I'm writing this one Tuesday! Wow, that means there must be supernatural cosmic forces at work! This guitar lead already reminds me of "Free Bird". So does the vocal cadence. This band are showing limitations already; it's already clear that they have a fairly narrow palette of ideas to draw from. There's a really chimey guitar in there with an interesting tone (good), an acoustic guitar that's all pick and no body (bad), and some strings in the left channel (and then the right, they move) that could be Mellotron. Wait, one of these guys was smart enough to master use of a Mellotron? There's an extended instrumental section that shows a little ambition, but definitely feels like a bit of detritus from the recently-concluded 1960s. The oft-repeated refrain is "Tuesday's gone with the wind. My woman's gone with the wind." Man, that's freakin' trite. This song is pretty long at 7:32 but seems to run out of steam a bit after the 5:00 mark. Doesn't really do anything new after that. Further noodling reaches a dynamic peak at 6:06 and then breaks down and keeps going; they definitely should have ended it there if not much sooner.
Gimme Three Steps
This song is ostensibly about a conflict between two men. One wants to shoot the other for dancing with his wife. The man with the gun pointed at him seems to imply that the woman never told him she was married, and he wouldn't have approached her if he knew. This is a very noble perspective and shows some level of integrity on his part; we wonder if the gunman let him go. Can we assume that "cutting a rug" (dancing) is a euphemism for doing something significantly more naked? If not, is dancing all that bad? Maybe it was 50 years ago... but then again, that era was much closer to a time when partner dancing was far more common than it is today. These days lots of people just jump out on the dance floor solo or with a group and shake it. Really, this song isn't about a conflict between two men. It's about a duplicitous woman who lied to our poor narrator. She needed to have told him she was married, or turned down his advances. Her dishonesty and selfishness is about to get this dude killed. The song is throwing light upon some of the more dire consequences of lying. Do I believe that? Probably not. But it's worth thinking about. "Well the crowd cleared away / And I began to pray / And the water fell on the floor." Is he crying, or did he piss himself? The song is another moderately competent little rocker with a sing-along chorus and way too much of the congas in the mix.
Simple Man
Simple song, simply lyric, simple man. When any lyric starts off with any variant on the theme of "my mama told me" you know we're in for something about being a good person and letting your troubles go. I want to hear a song that's like "my mama told me to do drugs, fuck, and drive faster, and that was great advice". Yeah, go write that one, I'll wait. Halfway through "Simple Man", the mix engineer cranks up the reverb on the snare drum for a dramatic effect, but then leaves it on for while. Sounded good for the dramatic part, but after that it just sounds awful, draws attention to itself, and murks up the mix. Later, they crank it up on individual drum hits at the end of each phrase. It sounds so cheesy, so bad. It's like this guy just got out of sound mixing skool and wanted to play around with these effects, but had no sense of how to use them with any grace or subtlety. This drummer is serviceable at best, but between these reverberation shenanigans and the backward stuff on "I Ain't The One" he just can't get a chance to play drums without this freakin' D-list mix engineer monkeying with his tone. The rest of the song is our vocalist warbling trite platitudes like "Be a simple kind of man / Won't you do this for me son, If you can? " Life-changing advice there, mom. Surprised she didn't advise him to buy a gun.
Things Goin' On
This sounds like a southern rock stereotype. It's like what someone from Massachusetts might think southern rock sounds like. "Too many lives they've spent across the ocean. / Too much money been spent upon the moon." Interesting and topical lyric there. I guess one of these guys is capable of reading a newspaper. Or at least listening to gossip. We can guess that the "across the ocean" line was in reference to war, or (being 1971) Viet Nam in particular. And of course this record was made two years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and during the years when five subsequent moon landings were happening. I reckon the moon landings to be one of the great achievements of both science and of the human spirit, one of mankind's finest moments. But it's also true that lots of people were against it at the time (as is clearly the case with this band's lyricist) because of the expense and the perspective that NASA is nothing but an extension of the military-industrial complex (a view which I understand but don't agree with; wars are destructive and vile, while space exploration is vital and life-affirming). "They're goin' ruin the air we breathe" (true 'dat, but listen, we're all helping them to do so), and "I don't think they really care / I think they just sit up there / And just get high." Yeah, the southerners and northerners can agree on one thing: shit's fucked up. It's just the specifics of what is most fucked up, and the why, and and the best methods of fixing it that no one can agree on.
Mississippi Kid
Ha, this acoustic bluegrass number starts off with a very Chuck Berry type of riff played in parallel on a banjo and an acoustic guitar. This tune sidesteps the southern rock cliches of the previous tune and goes straight for something resembling traditional Appalachian folk music. It isn't a remotely engaging tune, however. There's no melody or instrumental hook. Just a 12-bar blues pattern and a generic lyric. Indeed he mentions his pistols (four times). A slide-guitar solo is buried in the mix, and is a pale imitation of anything that the greats of mid-century country or the best players in western swing might have come up with. It's another amateurish moment that feels like somebody young experimenting with things they haven't mastered yet. That's totally cool, everyone needs to experiment, explore, and grow as an artist, but I don't want to listen to it. Master your craft and then record, kid. Acknowledging that this is their first album - and therefore they have growing to do - I'll also point out that it is near-universally considered to be their best album. Are we to understand that this band continued to get worse after this? One shudders. At the end of the song, there's this weird random processed/delayed snare effect. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't fit at all. There isn't any snare drum in the song otherwise. That engineer is the one "sitting up there getting high", apparently.
Poison Whiskey
After the bluegrass we get a riff-heavy rocker. This a cheerful song about a man whose father drank whiskey (specifically Johnny Walker red) until it killed him. "Take a tip from me, people... brothers can't you see / Ain't no future in ole poison whiskey." This was clearly more advice from his sweet mama. Moralizing aside, this this song is a tight little rocker, but the guy runs out of lyrics so he just keeps telling us not to drink whiskey. But, you know people use this as a joyous drinking song and have probably probably spent the past five decades playing it on jukeboxes all over Alabammy and Mississippi while downing shots. We get a little Hammond organ here, but the tone is a bit thin with some tricky resonance. That amateur mix engineer needed to have spent his time EQing the organ instead of fucking around with clumsy drum processing.
Free Bird
"FREEEEEEE BIRRRRRRRD!".
This is a song that came out when I was a toddler, and that I have subsequently spent my entire life trying to ignore. Today is the first time I have ever listened to this song on purpose, the first time I have ever made a deliberate choice to play it, and to listen to it carefully. So right off the bat we get this Hammond again. A little gritter tone this time. Better-sounding than on the previous tune. There's also piano: how did the keyboard player pull this one off live? Did one of the other guys help out on second keys? The keyboard player gives up completely, and the guitars take over. The vocalist sings four stanzas, and they don't melodically or dynamically develop at all. It's just the same thing four times in a row, so it's a bit monotonous. The singer's pitch is unsteady, he's having trouble holding the sustained notes. He's all over the place. Then he repeats "And this bird you can not change" bunch of times, while he and the band build things a bit, and the mix engineer fucks around with drum reverb again. The band just waffles after that. More slide guitar, which we heard in the intro, and it isn't super interesting. No one in this band have any ideas. None of them impress in either their performance or their innovation. Second verse is the same as the first. Same repetitive monotone melody that refuses to develop in any meaningful way. But we do get Mellotron strings. That's definitely Mellotron. This singer keeps singing "And this bird you can not change. / Lord knows, I can't change." over and over again. And this song won't fucking change. There is a bit of a build and a dynamic peak after each of the two verses, but other than that we're into nearly five minutes of repetitive dirge. Change the key, change the melody, change the tempo, change the freakin' hi-hat pattern... anything. And this song you cannot change. Lord knows, this band won't change. Finally at 4:40 the song kicks into a more sprightly tempo and lifts itself out of the slog it has subjected us to for the past 280 seconds. Those were 280 long and slow seconds, my friends. The song is only halfway over, but it has nothing left to say. No more words. The band just jam out. They sound excited and tight in this second half; they want to be playing this song. It's a good take, but it's fairly empty musically. It's just their guitarist(s) waffling for an intolerably long time. At 6:31, the rhythm section play staccato breaks, while two guitarists just play stupidly tedious arpeggios for a full 30 seconds. It's so deeply lame. This is bullshit. This is not great guitar playing. It's just a bunch of diddling. Find me development. Find me inventiveness. Find me melody. All we have here is guys who can wiggle their fingers real good. This is why punk decided to skip guitar solos altogether. If you're not a great player, don't even pretend. Make your point and then get out without subjecting us to your masturbation. All the young punks said: we can't sing either, and we can't play guitar either, but we do have something important to say. So they took a lesson from Lynyrd Skynyrd and learned to say what they had to say in two minutes of energy, and got out of dodge before the song wore out its welcome. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Song for the IFHTB mix tape:
Let's go with "Poison Whiskey". It's a quick banger that's relatively fun to listen to.
Next:
Bruce Springsteen, coming January 15, 2022
Aqualung
So there's this creepy homeless guy on the front (and back) cover of the album. The title track launches directly into describing this man's life. Sometimes seen as someone deserving of our sympathy, he's also painted as a perv watching the young girls run by. Many of us view people like the titular Aqualung with a combination of pity and revulsion. Is that the guy's name? Wonder why Anderson chose that name? Aqualung. Not a common name. If it's a metaphor for something, I'm not getting it. Maybe Anderson is considering our own judgmental nature here; the singer calls Aqualung his friend and acknowledges that he man is in pain and dying; perhaps the bit about watching the kids is an example of the aspersions that we cast upon the homeless so we don't feel bad about not helping them. This opening guitar riff is iconic. There's some stuff happening in the background with acoustic guitar and keyboards that feels messy; maybe it's so low in the mix because the arrangement wasn't really working. When a second guitar comes in it overpowers the first; this also feels like a bit of slop in the mixing. The two electric guitars needed to have been the same volume, blending together as one. Ok, now I wonder if Steve Wilson fixed that [edit: he did!]. Then the song breaks down to a radically quieter vibe and a heavily filtered "radio voice" with lots of delay effects. Yes, it seems that the earlier bit is our view of the homeless as sinister, then we get so the sympathetic part. The tempo picks up again and the song almost becomes joyful as the singer describes Aqualung's physical pain. Maybe these three sections represent the evolution of our perspective from mistrust to empathy to hope for his survival. The guitar solo that comes in next is fairly rote. There is nothing wrong with it, but also nothing about it that earns its length. When the rhythm section switches groove halfway through (4m 12s), it gives the extended instrumental some legs, but still this solo needed to have been half as long as it is (or less). Now some "dee dee dee" vocals, and a bit more sentimental well-wishing for our poor old pal. Then the rockin' part from the beginning comes back; it feels like they cut-and-pasted the first verse in here. Today that would take ten seconds in a DAW; in 1971 it would have taken about ten minutes cutting tape. Not a difficult process in either case. The lyric of Aqualung is complex, with a few possible interpretations, and it certainly covers infrequently trod ground. Musically the song has many ideas, but none of them are especially interesting... except for that iconic six-note guitar riff. It is prog-ish in that it utilizes a lot of parts and changes and bits. It keeps us on our toes by constantly switching direction. But after listening to Meat Loaf for my previous post it feels like Jethro Tull needed to take a page from Meatloaf songwriter Jim Steinman's playbook when it comes to keeping long and multi-segmented songs engaging (I never, ever thought I'd find myself typing these words). This one has the constant changes, but not enough ideas to fill those many segments with. Fewer parts but with more good ideas per part would have been a better way to go.
Cross-Eyed Mary
Ah, so here is Anderson's lauded flute, with strings no less. Ohh, are those strings from a Mellotron? Gotta love a Mellotron. Can't go wrong there. This sounds like a psychedelic-era Beatles out-take. Throw some backwards stuff on there, and it could be a b-side to "Strawberry Fields Forever". So, that intro was interesting musically. When the song kicks in, it really feels like an extension of "Aqualung". Oh wait, this lyrical hook sounds familiar. Was this song a single? I think I may have heard this. Is this song about a schoolgirl who hooks up with older men? That's kinda gross. Poor old Aqualung gets name-checked: he's watching the action. Cross-Eyed Mary might be one of the little girls that Aqualung has been checking out. So we've got kind of a seedy Jethro-verse of interrelated characters here. We've already met more screwed up people in two songs than in a whole side of a 1970s Tom Waits album. Actually, this album came out right around the same time as the first Waits album. I wonder if Tom grew up listening to the first few Jethro Tull albums? It's possible. But he certainly doesn't seem to have drawn anything from Tull musically. The alternating flute and guitar solos are nice. Panning them opposite works. At the end of the song they go into a more complex and more interesting version of that idea, expanding on it, but adding riffs from the piano and drum kit too. Kinda cool. This section could have gone on just a bit longer.
Cheap Day Return
This is a quick 85-second fragment of a folk song that seems to be a poignant little vignette about fame. The singer meets a nurse and gives her an autograph, but wonders if she's equally enthusiastic about her patients. Layered acoustic guitars and something else... maybe that Mellotron again? The drum set and electric guitars are gone. It's like a different band. But thank Hoffman they got the mastering right. How many albums have I listened to for this series while complaining that the acoustic numbers were too loud compared to the electric jams? Several. This one is balanced properly.
Mother Goose
This one has a bit of a Celtic feel. These flutes. They might be Anderson's flute layered, but really they sound like our old pal Mr. Mello again. Could be a blend of both. And this woody percussion. Almost like an inexpertly played tabla. This band is like prog-folk but with Mellotron. The tonality of this record is nice. It's warm and woody with a lot of space in it; the fuzztone psychedelic guitars are using sparingly (such as the "Aqualung" riff) and provide effective contrast. And, as if on cue, they pop up halfway through this tune, riffin' away. Lyrically, is it possible that this song is told from the delusional Aqualung's point of view? Wandering the town, causing mischief but not realizing the implications, watching laborers and not participating in their work, thinking he's a schoolboy (disassociating from his current predicament and remembering his happier younger life), and looking at the schoolgirls (again with the schoolgirls; I'm starting to worry about getting arrested for playing this record); but maybe poor ol' Aqualung sees a better version of his life in them. The girls are all sobbing "I don't believe they knew I was a schoolboy". He was once one of their ilk. But now his appearance makes them cry.
Wond'ring Aloud
After "Aqualung" I thought I was in for a solid prog record, but the past three tunes are really folksy. Well-recorded for the most part. The acoustic guitar, piano, and strings on this song are smooth and warm sounding, and blend well. Gotta cut that lip smacking at 1m 18s though. I hate that. Like "Cheap Day Return" this one is in and out in less than two minutes. Say your piece and get out of dodge. This is a sweet little thing about waking up in the morning with your sweet little thing. You can't hate it, it's too kind-hearted a song, but it also avoids being too syrupy. That's hard to balance.
Up to Me
We've got the acoustic guitar, hand percussion, and flutes again here, this time playing a kind of riffy acoustic groove. The electric guitar just adds a few little moments, barely there. This is like acoustic prog. We don't hear that a lot. As we reach the end of what was once side one, this music has some nice individual moments, but I'm not hearing any genius here. Reasonably intriguing lyrics, enough studio trickery to keep it sonically interesting (and relevant to its times), nothing offensive about the playing or engineering, and I'm not hating it for being mawkish or low-effort (the people here meant it), but... the essential spark that might make it special isn't here. That said, I'm starting to suspect that this is the kind of album that would get under one's skin after repeated listenings. It's simplicity might be deceptive. With the song "Aqualung" they might have been overreaching; when they're writing simpler songs with warm acoustic arrangements they seem to be channeling something more honest and seem like they're not trying so hard. It is entirely possible that the music in any of the sixteen posts that preceded this one would also grow on me with time (well, except for Marillion), but in most cases I fairly seriously doubt it. There seems to be an integrity to this music that belies its simplicity.
My God
Ehhhh.... right. I was just starting to consider that in the future I might possibly be on board with this band, but now we're getting a warning light. This song appears to be about how modern people have corrupted the word of the Christian god or Jesus to fit their own needs. That's all well and good, but I'm really not interested in religious lyrics. I don't happen to be a Christian, and when we go down this lyrical road it really pushes me away. Gods of any sort almost certainly do not exist. One person trying to tell another that their ideas about how to interpret words written by archaic men but attributed to metaphorical supernatural beings is pretty much a futile philosophical path. It's like trying to justify the notion of having a serious critical debate about your fantasy football team. The music on this track goes back into some more rockin' territory with a pretty virtuoso flute solo in the middle. It is impressive playing; this is the bit that probably earned Anderson his reputation. There's a really obvious edit at 3m 42s though [another type of edit: the Wilson mix smooths it out a little], and then some choirs and overdubbed extra flutes are added. It's pretty clear that the beginning of the flute solo was recorded at a completely different time and place compared to the second half. The whole segment (which lasts a full 1m 50s) memorable musically, but the choirs reinforce the religious textures in this track. The next song is called "Hymn 43", so I really hope we're not in for a suite of Jesus music here.
Hymn 43
Yeah, we're in for a suite of Jesus music here. "If Jesus saves, well He'd better save Himself / From the gory glory seekers who use His name in death". So, more lyrics defending Jesus from those who corrupted earlier versions of their pretend friend's words. You know, the words that weren't written down for 300 years after this death, and have been translated from one langauge to another a half-dozen times. Was there any point at whic they weren't corrupted? Same fairly predictable rock track backs it all up.
Slipstream
Another folksy quickie at just 76 seconds. These guys give The Ramones a run for their money in the short songs department. Ramones were always a great go-to for mix tapes when there wasn't enough tape left for a longer song at the end of a side. This band have two speeds; they're either playing essentially the same rock song over and over, or the same folksy thing over and over. The last thirty seconds of this one consist of some queasy strings that sound like the transition between songs on an E.L.O. record... except in this case, they miss the opportunity to actually be that. This band haven't done any segues between songs, but the outro to this song was a perfect opportunity to start.
Locomotive Breath
Speaking of Tom Waits, this one starts with a blusey barroom piano that seems lifted straight from early Waits. Maybe the title of this one is also a description of Wait's hygiene during his prime drinkin' and smokin' years. This tune has more religious metaphor. Old Charlie appears: that's the devil. The train that won't slow down is a description of your sins, Christians. Ugh, I really spoke too soon when listening to "Up to Me" and saying that this record might grow on me. Side two of this record feels like the same songs over and over but with church lyrics. The flute solo in "My God" is something worth hearing, but other than that I may just listen to Wilson's mix of side one and then permanently lay this record to rest. Ok, wait, this song jams a little toward the end. There's another nice flute solo with some interesting studio effects behind it; layered guitars and maybe even a synthesizer for a sec.
Wind Up
Yeah, more God stuff. Fuck. I didn't know I was going to have to go to church today. That's what I get for writing about these records without researching them first. My idea of going into these records completely blind and writing my real-time impressions has resulted in some nice surprises, but this isn't one of them. This shit is intolerable. Can't even focus on the instrumentals; they're repetitive and the ones on side two are not even as interesting as the only marginally interesting stuff on side one. Get me outta here. Ok, this song is more than six minutes long. I must stay here. I must listen. I'm not going to go pee. I'm not going to look at my email. I'm going to keep listening. Are you reading this? Fuck you. Go away so I can cheat and stop typing. How much of this song is left? God damn, almost half. Jesus fuckin' Christ. This shit is from hell. Ok, I'm gonna go fix typos in the previous parts of this post while this bullshit song runs out.
Bye.
Ha, he exclaims "Euuuuggghhh!" in the middle of the song.
Yup.
Bye again.
Song for the IFHTB mix tape:
Well, the title track is too long for a mix tape. And its got this weird vibe that's just got too many moods to make it fit in with mix jams. "Cross-Eyed Mary" might actually do the trick, but a deep cut like "Up to Me" could be the winner.
Next:
Lynrd Skynrd, coming January 01, 2022
Bat Out Of Hell
Wow, this intro is like a boogie woogie jam played at 45rpm instead of 33rpm. Then it crashes into something more moderate. This feels like an overture. Is this a concept album? The playing is good. That drummer is rock solid. But these guitars: parallel 4th or 5ths again! This is, what, the 4th or 5th post in a row where I had to suffer through this sound? This whole record sounds is a bit heavier than I expected. The cover art (more on that later) suggests a metal album, but the one song from this record that I already know ("Paradise By The Dashboard Light") is more middle-of-the-road. Oh man, this big chorus, it totally sounds like a showtune. No wonder this guy got cast in Rocky Horror. Well, that came out before this record. But he must have roots in musical theater. It's got that vibe, but it is much more hard rockin' than the average musical. Lyrically, it seems like he's trying to get laid here:
"I gotta break it out now,
before the final crack of dawn.
So we gotta make the most of our one night together.
When it's over you know, we'll both be so alone."
Then he's gonna be gone, like a bat out of hell. Oh, this break: it's kinda cool. Flanged guitars and a chattering rock-n-roll 8th-note piano triplets like Jerry Lee Lewis or something. A good effective bridge, a little change-up. Song seems like it's over around the 6m mark, but then there's this impossibly dirty dense crunchy guitar (almost like a motorcycle?) and we get a coda... this is where the dancing happens in the stage musical. Then more verses. This song has a new mood every 45 seconds, and it goes on for nearly ten minutes. But it keeps up its energy and sustains interest for the whole time. It was written by someone who knows what he was doing. This Steinman character. He's definitely written a couple-few songs before. I guess that's why he got props on the album cover. Like a showtune writer really. They always get that credit, every bit as much as the actors or the writer of the book ("the book" is the play's story, in musical theater parlance). Seems like Steinman and all of the players were all pros when they started this project. Not a full-time band per se, but a careful assemblage of session players. The way they're playing has that session player feel to it. Hard to pin down why, but I can tell.
You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)
Oh, this spoken-word intro. I've heard this. Again, it's very theatrical. And the reverb on their voices. Digital reverb was in its very infancy when this record was released (1977). We're hearing a chamber reverb. They actually ran the vocalists' voices through a big empty room to get that reverberation, and miked the result. I wanna know which studio this is. It's a nice-sounding chamber. Oh, this vocal hook, I have actually heard this song too. So there's two songs that I know on this record. But most of this song seems otherwise unfamiliar. It didn't get anywhere near the airplay of "Paradise". Or, I was able to turn it off faster. This song has a lot going on. Choirs, glockenspiels, sleigh bells. A little Motown-style drum beat in sections. Those glocks give a little Motown feel too. This song and the past one both seem to be about this lusty guy. Lots of pent-up adolescent tension here.
"Now my body is shaking like a wave on the water;
And I guess that I'm beginning to grin;
Oh we're finally alone and we can do what we want to;
The night is young'".
This record is one of the best-selling of all time. That's kind of surprising, given the heavily theatrical feel to it (then again, the South Pacific original cast recording was the single best selling record of the 1940s, so there's that). The songs are also very long - but that said, it was released at the height of the prog era so people were used to hearing longer songs (but these Meat Loaf tunes definitely aren't prog tunes). Still, this music was assembled with care. The playing is good, the arrangements stay interesting, and so far we have two long songs, both of which sustain interest. This fade though. The hand claps and the otherwise a capella coda work, but the song still had energy, even after a bit more than five minutes. They needed to bring the band crashing back in for a big finish then fade it.
Heaven Can Wait
Ah, the ballad. Of course.
"I got a taste of paradise,
that's all I really need to make me stay".
Yeah, this whole album is about the pursuit of some booty. I know what's coming up lyrically with "Paradise By The Dashboard Light", and so far we're three-for-three with songs that foreshadow that theme. There's a solid list of songs from the 1970s that use a very specific sort of faux-Baroque french horn arrangement style. It was a trend back then. There's a subtle use of it in this song, but it makes the list, along with "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" by Kate Bush and a whole bunch of others that I can't think of right now. This song is kinda dull though. Ballads can be great, but this one isn't holding me. Still, it was assembled with the same care as the other songs have been.
All Revved Up With No Place To Go
This sax. I really really hate this rock sax sound. The guy in Bruce Springsteen's band is the worst. Did he start the mania for this 1970s/1980s rock sax sound? Ech. I don't know where it came from. The component of R+B that fed into early rock and roll used a sax like this, but those old-timers made it work (Louis Jordan, I'm looking at you, and with great fondness), but after laying low for a while it came back, but just... wrong. Like the new Star Wars movies or something. So much potential in the originals, but a new generation who just didn't get it ended up making it annoying. Yeah, I fucking hate this sax tone so much. When did it go away again? Late 1980s? Geez, I am surprised - quite pleasantly - that it hasn't come back again. Anyway, the singer is still horny in this one.
"Every Saturday night,
I felt the fever grow;
Do ya know what it's like,
all revved up with no place to go".
Got it.
Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad
Speaking of sounds I hate: this acoustic guitar. They used a high-pass filter to get rid of everything below like 900 Hertz. It sounds thin and chimey. It's the worst. The rest of the mix is fine. Actually the mixing on this whole record is just as competent as the playing and arrangement are, but we're into another limp ballad here.
"I want you, I need you,
but there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you;
don't be sad because two out of three ain't bad".
That sounds like a country lyric. But still, yeah, we have a whole album here about a guy who just wants to get some. This song reminds me of that DJ Drama & Plies rap where Akon is singing all slow and tortured and sensitive, but addressing a stripper, auto-crooning: "I wanna fuck you". First time I heard that one was in 2008 at a konbini (convenience store) in Tokyo at like midnight. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This passionate ballad about how much he wants to pork a pole cat. It's so ludicrous, it must have been a parody. But it's not, and hearing it in the context of a Tokyo konbini's tinny sound system made it all the more surreal. Akon delivers his plea so sincerely, with great yearning. Anyway, this Meatloaf song is really the same thing.
Paradise By The Dashboard Light
Aside from way too many screenings of Rocky Horror, something else that happened about a million times in my youth was hearing "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" on FM radio. It was kind of inescapable back then, but I don't think I've heard it in decades. Somehow, I've managed to outrun it or something, perhaps with a mental motorcycle even more ridiculous than the one on this album cover. And look at the guy riding it. Is his spine broken? He looks like he's in pain. OK, I guess he was just in hell, so maybe he's not doing so well. But he's escaping at least. He should look happier, being recently de-helled and all. Maybe he just broke his back. The pose and the look on his face both support that theory. Or yoga. This guy got kicked out of hell for doing too much yoga. Who painted this? It looks like Richard Corben, who did a lot of stuff in good ol' Metal Hurlant around this same time period. Anyway, this song spends a lot of time - 8m 28s - building a case for an essential truth about adolescent male sexuality, which is that a pubescent boy will say or do any fucking thing he has to in order to get laid. All the young dudes are programmed that way by their very DNA. They are biologically compelled by the most ancient forces of nature to fuck as much as possible. From an evolutionary point of view, it is why he exists. But modern life makes it so hard. Heh. So hard. Quite so. In the case of this song, the poor lad gets what he wants, and he regrets it when his girlfriend goes on to drive him crazy. Lyrically there's a big punch line here, which is pretty obvious in retrospect, but hearing this song so regularly for so many years kind of diminishes the impact. I'm surprised and not surprised that I could (if I wanted to which I don't) sing along with all of this. The mix on this one sounds even more expensive than the others. They put some effort into this. And some cash. I'm listening to the drums during the "love scene" (where the baseball announcer is doing his thing). This drummer is killing it, laying back on the groove after the snare on the four-beat, with that open hi-hat. It's so simple, not showy, but it's all skill. Subtle. Then he wails on the fills at this section's er... climax. This piano player is working hard too. Lots of inventive stuff in the arrangement.
For Crying Out Loud
All right, so this guy finally got some, and regretted it. Now we get a ballad. This boy has exhibited a perpetual refusal to commit or open up to any emotions over the course of this record, always just wanting to get laid. I predict he is going to crack by the end of this song and he's gonna fall for the girl. That's the happy ending right? Well he got the "happy ending" in the previous song. But then he was sad about it.
"I was cold and you were fire"
Yup, here we go.
This ballad is going to also build into a big album closer, I can feeeeel it.
"For crying out loud, you know I love you"
There it is. He's crabby about it, but he cracked. Now he's really screwed. A pause, some strings, a verse, and then - woah - at 4:36, we have the mother of all mid-ballad bombastic lifts. The thing just gets huge. This songwriting trope is predictable well beyond the scope of being a cliché, but this whole record's vibe has been about going big with the production, and they do indeed do. Indeed. But the mastering here... who the hell fucked this up? It so so clearly and obviously distorted. Someone totally fell asleep at the wheel on this one. Complete and absolute fail. Sounds like my loudspeaker is broken... but it's not. The fucking mastering industry is broken. Oh wait, the song has mellowed again. Yeah, I can't even focus on this one anymore. Ok, must focus. So the lyrics in the last few minutes of this also-epic song (this one is 8m 43s). Seem to be almost religious. There's some stuff here that can easily be construed as him singing to his lord rather than the girl. Maybe he dumped the dame and found Jesus.
I don't really like this record, but I respect it. Everyone involved - from the writers to the performers to the original engineers - were at the top of their game. It's quality. But I just don't dig the musical theater vibe.
I rarely do this, but after writing all of the above I had to look some stuff up:
Turns out that Jim Steinman is not Meat Loaf. Michael Lee Aday is Meat Loaf, and yeah, he was in the original stage cast of Rocky Horror. Makes sense. The female voice on a few songs is the noted Ellen Foley. Lo and behold, this record was produced by the admirable Todd Rundgren, with members of his band Utopia playing on it... as did a few guys from Springsteen's band. But not the sax clown. That's Edgar Winter playing that yakety sax on "All Revved Up". Sorry Edgar. Go away. But I was in the ballpark with the Springsteen thing, and: "Rundgren found the album hilarious, thinking it was a parody of Springsteen." Shit, Springsteen is his own parody. It was recorded in several places, including Rundgren's Bearsville Studio in upstate New York. No word on whether "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth" was mixed there though (to get that reverb sound), but apparently Rundgren did mix that track so it's likely we're hearing Bearsville. Steinman was a composer, lyricist, record producer, and playwright who also produced Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" which you'll never, ever, ever read about again in this series. He died in April of this year [2021]. Corben did indeed paint the album cover. His Den character in Metal Hurlant was always kind of lame anyway. I was more of a Moebius guy.
Song for the IFHTB mix tape:
Ok, this album is like 47 minutes long (pushing the limits for the carrying capacity of a vinyl record in its day; the rule of thumb was to max out around 22 minutes per side before we start losing sound quality). Three of the songs are over eight minutes. This isn't really a mix tape friendly songwriting style. It's a freakin' miracle that "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" was played on the radio. It's as long as three regular pop singles. I dunno. Maybe "Hot Summer Night "... or we can end the mix with "Paradise"?
Next:
Jethro Tull, coming December 15, 2021
Toys in the Attic
Wow, right into it. No spacey intros, just bang, rockin' right in your face. Then this vocal comes in. It's not grabbing me though. This song has energy but it's treading water musically. The chorus: "toys toys toys" hard-panned and reverbed. That's a lame chorus. Then these verses again. They sound like Cheap Trick out-takes. Actually this whole song sounds like something Cheap Trick would have done better. The way it's mixed is sloppy: everything louder than everything. The guitars compete with the bass and drums, and then the vocals compete with the guitars. There are ways to make this happen without everything being so murky. The mix stops slamming and just gets messy. But whatever, the song isn't there. It's a lame song. Maybe it works live though. Might get the crowd going.
Uncle Salty
A better mix right off the bat, but man this song is fucking generic. This is Aerosmith's best album? I shudder at the very notion of hearing their worst. The bridge ("ooh, it's a sunny day outside my window") has this reverb on the voices. Like the choruses in "Toys". They like to play with that. Guitar solo is short and tasteful. The "sunny day outside my window" lyric comes in again. The panned vocals starting at the 3:00 mark, alternating channels, playing off of each other. Those are kinda fun. Yeah, the best part of this song is the end. Take that any way you want to.
Adam's Apple
This band are just uninspired. It's like the whole record is filler. These songs are just low-effort. Their playing is fine I guess, neither good nor bad. The production is similarly fine, not impressive, but fine. But the songs just aren't here. Wait, listen to that baritone sax in there. That's a surprise. I like it. Even if he's only playing like three notes. Ah, parallel guitar solos. I hate to say it, but after listening to The Eagles do this last time (Post 13), I gotta say that even the evil Eagles do that sort of thing better than Aerosmith does. Hey, what the fuck does "Aerosmith" mean? Never cared enough to wonder. Some kind of airplane mechanic? Or a play on the Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith? That's probably it. Is this song still on? Ack! That falsetto scream! No.
Walk This Way
Ok, here's the hit. Reverb on the drums. And the vocal. All of the mixing is much tighter, the whole song is mixed better than the other three have been. They knew this one was going on the radio, so they spent more money on it. Oh, and that cowbell. I got a fever, I need more cowbell. The band sound way more energized here, and the song itself is significantly more catchy than any of the other three. Maybe the lyrical substance is no better, but there's a guitar hook here, and a sort of proto-rap thing in the voice. It's clear why Run-DMC were attracted to this. If you're gonna do a rap-rock hybrid, this one already has a vocal suitable for that. This song does have an exuberance in the performance that the three other tepid tracks on this record so far have been missing. Like the band are excited to be playing this song, but were as bored playing the other ones as I was listening to them. As the song progresses, the mixing becomes more sloppy though. Guitar levels are all over the place. Like the producer and mix engineer made the mistake of letting the band into the studio during the mix and people just started pushing themselves up whenever they felt like it. Most of the songs on this record sound this way.
Big Ten Inch Record
This is a cover. The original 1952 version by Bull Moose Jackson is a raunchy jump-blues R+B classic. It's funny to hear Aerosmith trying to swing though. The baritone sax is back, and there's a little piano in there too. It's a lame cover though. It would have been way cooler if Aerosmith were just playing it in their style instead of trying to make a freakin' swing record. The point of doing a cover is to make the song your own. A hard rock band playing an old R+B thing in an ersatz neo-swing style just doesn't fit on this album. This harmonica solo. It needed to have been Joe Perry's guitar.
Sweet Emotion
I've never really taken the time to pay attention to this song. This intro is interesting, a little bass ostinato with vibro-slap, ambient effects, and some talkbox effects. Kinda fun. When the drums kick in it's the closest this band have come to grooving. Oh, and backward drum effects in the bridge. All that gratuitous studio trickery gets me every time. It's a bit heavy-handed in this song, almost too loud. It shouldn't draw attention to itself at the expense of the song. But backward drums man. Love it. Interesting song structure here too. We've got these semi-rappy vocals again for verses, and then the guitar riff with the backward drums in place of a real chorus. But the refrain of "sweet emotion" that only happens a few places in the song; it's not even really a chorus. So they really screwed around with structure here. It works though. Then this bridge/solo... which ends up being the end of the song. Yeah, this songwriting is kind of insane. But like "Walk This Way", they clearly shot most of their wad here. It's an unlikely choice for a single given how wonky the structure is, and also because it has no real chorus, but it's clearly an inspired moment for these guys. There was creative potential exhibited here that they don't seem to have tapped into often enough.
No More No More
This title describes how I feel about hearing the rest of this record. Now that we've got the two big hits and the unfortunate cover song behind us, we're back into the territory of filler cuts. This one has more going for it than the first three songs on the album. A little boogie woogie style piano in there, and a bit more energy. The song "Toys in the Attic" was trying to rock and rock hard, but it just didn't. This one is a considerably less heavy, but it's got a stronger sense of feel, a better performance, and more authentic energy to it. It's the best of the non-hits so far. Nothing special, just a competent mainstream rock song. It does go on a bit too long though. This 4:34 song just waffles for the last minute. An earlier fade would have helped this one. Did they have a guy who switched between piano and second guitar? Maybe Tyler handled some of that? Wondering how they pulled some of this stuff off live.
Round and Round
Ok, this one is big n' heavy. But going nowhere. He's singing about something over this repetitive plodding riff. See, this songwriting is crap. It just goes... um... round and round... without really doing much. Sounds like a jam they never developed into something stronger. Their producer needed to have helped them develop this song further. That's a big part of his fuckin' job. Then these splattering guitar solo-ettes. They're so far on top of the rest of this murky gooey mix that they sound like they're in a different recording. This song sucks ass. Easily the worst on tis album. Man, we're only 3:15 in, and there's another two minutes to go. Ok, I'm gonna sit here and twiddle my thumbs for a while. This is fucking tedious. Even the production effects aren't saving this one. When flanged backward modulated stuff still doesn't pull me in, then you know the song is worthless. Maybe this one is good if you're really high?
You See Me Crying
This title describes how I feel about hearing the rest of this record. Hearing this piano and this string thing after the dark bombast of "Round and Round" just isn't working. It doesn't flow. There's some straight-up Queen here. Is this Steven Tyler singing? Where's the rasp? Oh there it is. Yeah, this song is Aerosmith trying so hard to be Queen. Well it ain't working. Do they have a whole orchestra in there? Sounds like it. Someone spent some money on this one. Were they pushing this song as a third single? Maybe it was. But I've never heard it. What the fuck is he doing with his voice at 2:28? It's like a parody of Tom Waits at the end of "Shore Leave" or Donald Duck or both. Then the big grand guitar solo and orchestra. Ok, there is lots of production value here. This is where the ambition comes back. They're trying here. This orchestra is really doing a lot. Someone kicked the producer in the ass after "Round and Round" and told him to get to work. And he did. Most of what we're hearing on this tune is the work of the producer or arranger. None of the guys in the band had anything to do with this orchestration. This is Aerosmith as puppets. It's huge though. They built up some bombast. The playing is fine. But it's still just not a great song. After an instrumental bit, the song is ending and I can't remember the vocal hook at all. Already.
Selection for IFHTB mix tape:
Hate to say it, but the only true draw for this record are the two big hits. The orchestration on "You See Me Crying" is nicely handled, and there are pleasing moments on "No More No More" and maybe on the title track, but "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion" are undoubtedly the standouts. I think I prefer "Sweet Emotion", but "Walk This Way" is probably a better vibe for a mix tape, so there ya' go.
Next:
Uriah Heep, Coming November 15, 2021
