It’s telling that Warner Brothers tags John Cale’s Paris 1919 as ‘classical’ music. While most would consider it rock or pop, it certainly is a genre defying album. With assistance from the UCLA symphony orchestra, Paris 1919 is heavy on strings juxtaposed with piano and guitar. Though, no particular instrument dominates the proceedings. In fact, all nine tracks are seamless, which is a small miracle anytime rock musicians recruit orchestras. The lyrics, seemingly about Western European aristocrats, are deeply impressionistic. Rarely is a clear story told, but the imagery is vivid. The tone of the entire album – excepting the rocker “MacBeth” – is melancholic, as Cale is an observer of these characters milling about and passing through his sights. However, Cale doesn’t seem to have a favorable view of the upper crust of Western European society. I like to think “Half Past France,” the second to last track, represents Cale’s exit from this society, though it’s not clear who Cale thinks is after him (“If they’re alive then I am dead.”). The last song, “Antartica Starts Here,” which Cale whispers, seemingly is about a woman’s fading appeal, perhaps a metaphor for a stagnant and dying culture, or maybe just another composite sketch, part of the greater whole. —m patton
Album Reviews
John Lee Hooker & Canned Heat “Hooker ’n Heat” (1971)
There have been a number of albums produced over the years which match a legendary figure from blues music with some his admirers in well known contemporary rock or blues bands. Blues and other music critics often lambast these efforts and hold them in utmost contempt. Some of these sessions are truly awful but some come off well, such as “Fathers and Sons” with Muddy Waters and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. “Hooker ‘N’ Heat,” released on Liberty Records in 1970, stands as possibly the best example of generational meeting of the minds. Canned Heat was at the top of their popularity and Hooker was fading from the public eye somewhat. This record helped to revitalize interest in Hooker’s music. Most of Hooker’s best work, out of hundreds of recordings, many under assumed names, is solo, just “The Hook,” his left foot and his guitar. On albums where he recorded with full bands or other accompaniment his rough, often uneven style, with a measure count that often varied, didn’t mesh well with musicians accustomed to playing arrangements or standard blues classics. Sometimes the clash detracted from the product. The band Canned Heat had no such problems. It was obvious that he loved the band and they loved him! Bob “The Bear” Hite, the band leader, who usually provided the gruff vocals on much of the band’s material, was a blues collector and historian and was well acquainted with Hooker’s music and the band itself was rough hewn and unpolished but played with feeling and a respect for the music. Hite is not heard on the album. He wisely stood aside and gave the spotlight to Hooker. No band ever backed the Hook better. This was the last album for ‘Heat member Alan Wilson, who plays harmonica and piano. Wilson would soon after be dead from poisoning and choking on barbituates while on a camping trip. Wilson plays inspired harp on this album and gets special recognition from Hooker for it. Wilson is one of the under rated harmonica players of our time and this stands as his memorial. With the recent passing of John Lee Hooker this album could be considered among his best work as well. —Dick
Spellbinder “Gabor Szabo” (1966)
Take a Latin rhythm section and add a Hungarian immigrant with formal musical training and a love of Jazz and Gypsies. Then place in a recording studio in 1966 with a producer with the courage and deep pockets to let the music happen largely unplanned. Now add a touch of genius and a sprinkling of bad taste and you have Spellbinder. I have to say that I can easily forgive the vocal because it is so charming. It really is disarmingly silly. And the overdubs are out of place. BUT Spellbinder and Gypsies Queen are well worth the price of admission, and most of the other tunes are very moving as well. This is one of the most enjoyable, spontaneous and heartfelt guitar albums of the 60s. No, Gabor Szabo is not Jimi Hendrix or Johnny Smith. Let’s say he is to Hendrix or Smith as Scriabin is to Brahms. It is a wild and magical trip complete with an occasional Hungarian guttural. Relax. Close your eyes. Let it happen. Take the trip. —Mitchell
Warren Zevon “Warren Zevon” (1976)
You all know him as the “Werewolf in London”, but beyond that infectious radio hit, Warren Zevon has always been an ‘if you know you know’ kind of artist. The shadow cast between Zevon’s work and public appeal is no mystery. The guy doesn’t really look cool or attractive, he’s not edgy in any kind of an outsider way, and he doesn’t seem to have an angle. Yet, all these things seem to contribute to the charm once you’re in on it. Sort of cheesy arrangements placed over very well crafted, very mainstream LA sounding songs drenched in black humor. Almost lounge-y style of vocal delivery, which only seems to fit because he was such a known porn-addict/party dog that even when the songs are sad you kind of chuckle. He spent years as a loved session musician before calling on his friends to return the favor, so this album is loaded with guest appearances including some of the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Brown (also the producer), Bobby keys, Bonnie Rait, and many more, all lending some talent to this wonderful, and wonderfully overlooked record. —Alex
Nick Mason “Fictitious Sports” (1981)
One of the best Pink Floyd solo albums, but it’s not really fair to characterize it as such as it’s really a Carla Bley album that Mason agreed to put his name on in the hope of shifting more copies. (We can see how well that worked! Maybe if they had thrown a flying pig on…)
Anyway, it’s a superb record, and considering Wyatt was in sort of semi-retirement at the time this was recorded (he did very, very little between the ’75 Henry Cow gigs and the Rough Trade singles that formed the basis of “Nothing Can Stop Us”) it’s a great pleasure to hear his voice on the majority of the album. “I’m A Mineralist”, a simultaneous parody of sexual perversion and Philip Glass, is often cited as the highlight and indeed it is a very good song, but there’s honestly not anything bad on tap anywhere. Recommended to Wyatt and Bley fans. For anyone buying this hoping to hear some of the excitement and thrills of “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party”… WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? —David
Rosebud “Discoballs – A Tribute to Pink Floyd” (1977)
Being neither a massive fan of Pink Floyd OR Disco at the time I discovered Rosebud, you’d have been hard-pressed to convince me of this record’s genius based on description alone. But holy crap – this record goes beyond likes and dislikes, preferences and prejudices. Throw this sick puppy on the turntable once and JUST TRY to deny the power. I defy you to.
Like nearly all Disco success stories of the day, Rosebud was a studio project, strategically assembled from the cream of French session musicians of the era. The group lineup here is as impressive as it is confounding, featuring two members of the esteemed prog outfit, Magma, and a future Oscar and Grammy award winner in producer/arranger Gabriel Yared. Yared would go on to future triumphs with highly-acclaimed scores for “The English Patient,” “Cold Mountain,” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” but Discoballs made his name as a world-class producer/arranger, hinting at his bright future in composition.
A project like this could easily have slid down the treacherous slope into novelty, but the performances and arrangements are too combustible and visionary to dismiss. The dance floor incinerating transformation of “Have A Cigar” checks all of the boxes requisite for a disco track, while managing to sound fresh and exciting, building steadily to an ecstatic finale. The band play in such a tightly-coiled and controlled funk pocket that it almost sounds looped, and Yared’s subtle touches – hand claps on the breaks, cowbells dropping where the conga line would be, swooping string stabs – capitalize on the tension the band builds, whipping it into a frenzy of aural sensation by track’s end. All of this without the musicians ever breaking, or even varying from the initial vamp set up at the outset of the track. Even if there wasn’t an entire album of Floyd standards to ice the cake, “Have A Cigar” would be a legendary statement in and of itself. This is one of those tracks that feels like a total genesis moment – pointing the way forward to the House, Techno, and Electro movements of the ’80’s. I’d wager to guess there’d be no LCD Soundsystem without this record as well.
As my uncle always says whenever he hears this – “Man, when this song would play at Circus people would go crazy – dancing, fighting, pushing…” —YouTube comments for “Have A Cigar.” Nuff sed. —Jonathan Treneff
Moby Grape “20 Granite Creek” (1971)
I’ve come to realize two things about Moby Grape: one is that they are very much the sum of five very different songwriters, preventing a certain cohesiveness to their records. The other is that their good songs are so good that they make having every record worth it just to use as mix tape secret weapons. “20 granite creek” was recorded after the bands first split as sort of a last attempt to mend the original Grape during that era, and it’s certainly the most solid album since their classic self-tiled debut. Most people (record nerds I mean) will jump straight to Skip Spence when referring to Moby Grape’s music of deeper conscience. This is understandable since he’s kind of the U.S. version of Syd Barrett; your classic “acid casualty” who split from the Grape due to insanity, relocating from groovy california to nutty Bellevue Hospital in New York for a stint, followed by the classic head-damaged solo album “OAR”. But even after a resume like that, Spence’s contributions of dark emotion fall flat to the songs of over-looked member Peter Lewis. where Lewis gets his muse is beyond me. He seems far more boring of a 60’s dude than Skip, however, his songs, “Apocalypse” and “Horse out in the Rain” are not only the best of “20 Granite Creek” but the best Moby Grape songs period. Apocalyspe is sort of a Byrds or Neil Young like tune, in which its very rocking and electric guitar based, but with a mellowness in the vocals that spans across the paced hook of the drums. The last track on the record “Horse” is something else all together. A short dark little folk tune laced in echo and reverb string arrangements. Very, very haunting. And the rest of this rockin’ little record is pretty good too, especially with aid of doobie smoke or incense to paint the mood. But again those two afore mentioned songs are more than worth what modest amount this LP costs, because both possess that rare, magical thing that the best psychedelic music of late 60’s/early 70’s possesses: a timeless quality. —Alex
Patti Smith “Horses” (1975)
During the late 1990’s, in my young teenage years, I fell deeply into your standard “punk” phase. Naturally I was well aware from day one that “Horses” stood as some sort of ultimate classic among the genre’s first outpour. Teachers would tell you this, parents, Rolling Stone magazine. As a young idiot, i would agree. Maybe out of guilt for not “getting it”. I realize now that that’s total bullshit. “Horses” is not a great punk album. Not anymore. Not to a kid. It is, however, one of the finest rock albums ever crafted. Perfect 70’s, in-the-pocket, electric guitar music stretched across unchained, stream of conscience song writing. It’s so genius in the way that Patti Smith seems to understand that the groove of rudimentary rock music is in itself high art. No need to delude it with prog timing or bloated arrangements. Yet as organic as the record sounds, it still comes across like some wild audio painting with no concrete rules or limits. The way that the band speeds up and slows down through tracks like “free money” or the title track, is so natural, so jammin’, that i find myself uncontrollably shaking my hips with every listen, including right now behind the counter at Jive Time. Now that’s a true monument to American culture, counter or otherwise. For fans of The Stones, The Velvets, or American high art in general. Not for punks. —Alex
Giorgio Moroder “Cat People” (1982)
Another record I dismissed on first sight, Cat People has become a go-to, both for Djing and home listening. Although I’ve still never seen the questionable-looking sci-faux film this was made for, it’s almost beside the point. This thing could have been made to soundtrack an instructional guide to the cat’s cradle and it would still rule.
Cat People followed Moroder’s American Gigolo soundtrack by only a couple of years, but the departure from the Italo-disco sound he helped trademark is considerable. Everything here is slowed down to a twilight half-speed. David Bowie’s “Putting Out Fire (With Gasoline)”, a slow-to-ignite, soul-rock number, actually sounds more at home here than on his chart-busting Let’s Dance album, and is the most muscular piece by far. Breaking the synth lines and drum programming of his earlier work down to a sinister, skeletal slow-pulse proved yet again Moroder’s vision in his unflinching willingness to break with the past to stay a step ahead of the game. However, this time it would be nearly 20 years before the bedrock vibrations emanating here were felt at all, first surfacing in the brief synth-electro revival of the early 2000s, and more recently in the narcotic crepuscule of Chromatics, who brought the new crop of interpreters to wider recognition with their work on the Drive soundtrack. A direct line can be drawn from Cat People and everything Chromatics producer Johnny Jewel and his Italians Do It Better label have done to bring the new wave of synth-italo-disco to the masses in the last half-decade. The heavily reverb-ed, delicately plucked and muted guitar lines and cinematic synth wash of Chromatics, Glass Candy, Desire, and their current legion of followers can be traced directly to this record, one of the most compelling and original records of it’s era, soundtrack or otherwise. –Jonathan Treneff
Bill Cosby “Badfoot Brown & The Bunions Bradford Funeral Marching Band” (1970)
Believe it or not, this ultra-obscure 35-minute shot of heady psychedelic jazz-funk came from the mind and soul of Bill Cosby. Yes, THAT Bill Cosby!
A crate-digger’s delight, the album was originally released in 1971 and features two extended tracks (“Martin’s Funeral” and “Hybish Shybish”) the album does a remarkable job of bringing to musical life the tense, tumultuous, but ultimately invigorating era in which it was recorded. Cosby is no slouch on the keys; and though he is galaxies away from the man, the comedian’s bursts of electric piano at times recall Sun Ra. An oddity given its association with Cosby, the album remains an excellent slab of heavy, spaced-out jazz funk and will be of interest to any fan of the style.
Larry Young “Lawrence of Newark” (1973)
Even by Larry Young standards this is a strange album, which is to say this is a very very strange album, but also a very good one. There seems to be two different styles present on this album. Half of the songs are in a mystical psychedelic African fusion style, and the other half seem to be Young’s unique take on minimalism, with the different instruments in his large ensemble playing repeating riffs in forceful, and sometimes almost chaotic fashion. The unifying factor throughout this album is a very low-fi production and purposefully sloppy mixing that has instruments at strangely mismatched volumes. Always one to chart his own course, Larry seems to be trying to strip any gloss or sheen off his music by not allowing any sort of post production work. On a couple of tunes you can actually hear the tape machine start up mid-jam while the band is already playing.
Trying to describe this music is a bit tough, but let’s start with a mix consisting of a low-fi version of Santana’s Caravanserai, some of Sun Ra’s African grooves, John Cale’s rock-minimalism experiments with Terry Riley, Miles’ Bitches Brew with it’s constantly noodling instruments bubbling up from the background and possibly Keith Emerson’s distorted B3 extended psychedelic jams with the Nice. All throughout this album Larry’s Hammond B3 is run through a variety of reverbs and distortion devices, and he constantly manipulates the tone bars creating shifting psychedelic sounds that can instantly rush from a shimmering whisper to a full on roar.
This album isn’t for everybody, I think the lack of production values would be a big turn off for many, but for me the rough sound is part of this album’s appeal. Larry’s solos on here are powerful and creative as he proves he ranks high with the very best jazz fusion and progressive rock Hammond B3 artists. His massive ensemble is equally talented as the percussionists play hypnotic poly-rhythms and the saxophonists create counterpoints to Larry’s bold melodies. —JS
The Psychedelic Furs “The Psychedelic Furs” (1980)
Disjointed. Messy. Sassy. Irreverent. Loud. Acidic. Mocking. A strange brew of psychedelia, glam rock, post punk, and new wave with a lead vocalist who can not friggin’ sing. Kind of sounds like the Sex Pistols and Roxy Music had a one night stand and gave birth to a love child. And while we are on the stupid subject of love… God, I’m in love with this album! One of my all-time favorites. Ignore the claims usually made for ‘Talk Talk Talk; This is the best thing in the Furs discography. If the opening tour de force of “India,” “Sister Europe,” “Imitation of Christ,” and “Fall” doesn’t do anything for you, we just can’t relate, bro. Magnificent! —Minimalism
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