Here’s another extract to whet your appetite even more:
- Elvis Costello – Spike
The early punky Costello was great and it is normal for an artist to mellow and mature as they get older, wiser and more adept. I am pleased to say that while Elvis certainly did develop his music, broaden it and bring in different styles, the power and ferocity of his lyrics and delivery were only intensified. This album was exceptionally spiky in places.
This was released in 1989 and was his twelfth studio album. It also contains one of my favourite tracks.
At this time Elvis moved labels and was also co-writing with Paul McCartney. Who knows? Perhaps the Beatles could have reformed with Elvis taking the John Lennon role? He certainly had the venom and bite to do justice to it. He could have pulled off the acerbic part quite well.
The two tracks he wrote with Paul are very good. ‘Veronica’ was very commercial but ‘Pads paws and claws’ was more experimental but still very accessible and catchy. It was a collaboration that showed promise.
‘Baby plays around’ was a beautiful song, sung very delightfully with a great deal of melancholy concerning a break-up of a relationship in which one’s partner is openly unfaithful. ‘…This Town’ was the opening track and was much more like the Elvis of his first few albums. This was the Punk Elvis lamenting the fact that in order to get on you had to be a complete bastard. ‘God’s comic’ is a great song and send-up of religion, a priest who had not been too religious has an audience with God who is listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber and wondering if he should have given the world to the monkeys. ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’ is a song about confronting your own failings.
This was an album with a number of different styles, moods, instrumentation and types of songs. If that was all it would be an excellent album but that wasn’t all. There were two songs that had an exceptional impact on me. The first was the snarling diatribe against hanging ‘Let him dangle’. It told the story of a couple of young thieves who were cornered by the police. Young Bentley was already under arrest and Craig had a gun pointing at the police officer. ‘Let him have it,’ Bentley told Craig. Craig shot the officer dead. Craig was underage got life and Bentley was hung. Elvis turned it into a passionate expose of the viciousness of State murder and the hatred and primitive revenge involved. It was a thought-provoking tale delivered with real anger.
But the stand out track for me was ‘Tramp the dirt down’. It still sends chills running through me when I play it. The melodic beauty of the song only serves to accentuate the hatred in the lyrics as Elvis contemplates the cold, calculated duplicity of Margaret Thatcher. I still have a vivid memory of her standing on the steps at number ten delivering her election speech at the start of her term of office saying how she would bring harmony to the country while already plotting to break the unions and create havoc. Elvis pours out his vitriol as he goes through the trail of Tory deceit over the treatment of public services, the health service and the glorification of the Falklands war. It’s probably not too late to get there and tramp that dirt down so she never gets out, perhaps a good sharp stake should be deployed first though!
- The Fall – Slates
The Fall were one of John Peel’s favourite bands. It is easy to see why. They have consistently gone about doing their own thing throughout the whole of their long career without the slightest nod to fashion, commerciality or anybody’s views.
Mark E Smith is the Fall. Despite all the personnel changes he is the guvnor! He directs the music, bosses the band around and dictates what goes on. He once said that even if it was him with his moth-in-law on bongos it would be the Fall.
They go about producing their raw output of post-punk without regard to taste, political correctness or the media and often with seeming contempt for their own audience.
I have been to live performances with strange film intros that went on and on, Mark seemingly so intoxicated he could not function, and virtual fights on stage. I’ve also been to concerts where they have motored along completely in tune with the audience with everyone bouncing about and singing along with Mark.
This is the usual type of Fall album. The driving riffs with Mark reciting and shouting his lyrics over it. The result is great. I can’t say he has a great voice but the effect is more interesting than all the plastic bands put together. From ‘Hip Priest’ to ‘Slates, slags etc.’ it drives along. There is that repetitive coda and variation that makes it interesting. You can feel the Captain Beefheart influence.
- Randy Newman – Lonely at the Top
This has all Randy’s great songs all gathered together. It gives you a great view of Randy’s genius. There is so much of Randy’s quirky humour and idiosyncratic observation. He is able to hone a lyric to its bare bones, deliver it with perfect phrasing to a simple but perfectly effective backing. This album has many of my favourites.
‘Political Science’ is a sardonic view of the rest of the world in which Randy suggests that America should just nuke everybody, except Australia – don’t want to hurt no kangaroo – boom goes London! Boom Paris!
‘God’s song (That’s why I love mankind)’ is a send up of religion in which God is a character who is a capricious individual who doesn’t care a jot about people yet is amazed by the antics of humans in the face of his vindictiveness.
There’s the full spectrum here with ‘Short people’, ‘Rednecks’, ‘Jolly Coppers on parade’, ‘I love L.A.’ ‘Germany before the war’, ‘Birmingham’ etc etc. The album ends with his own send up of himself with ‘Lonely at the top’.
What a song-writer! What humour!
- Sam Cooke – Portrait of a Legend
Sam was the guy with the smooth silken voice who was capable of big soulful ballads, Pop songs and more rocking numbers. That voice came straight out of Gospel. He started singing at an early age and became the lead vocalist with the leading Gospel group ‘The Soul Stirrers’.
He left Gospel to move into secular R&B focussing on producing singles and immediately hit with ‘You send me’. This crossed over into the Pop charts and was followed by a string of other hits ‘Only sixteen’, ‘Cupid’, ‘Chain gang’, ‘Little Red Rooster’, ‘What a wonderful world’, ‘Bring it on home to me’, ‘Twistin’ the night away’ and ‘Shake’.
There was a great deal of variation in his work. A comparison between the Pop of ‘Cupid’ and the Blues of ‘Little Red Rooster’ (recorded before the Stones did their version). He also tackled issues like the Civil Rights fight for justice which was an incendiary thing to do at the time; his song ‘A change is going to come’ was a brave thing to do.
Sam’s soulful voice was one of the precursors of Soul music. Unfortunately Sam was not there to participate. He was shot dead at a motel in very dubious circumstances. Seemingly he was drunk and took a girl back to his room. She stole his clothes and ran off claiming he was going to rape her and the distraught Sam was shot dead by the white motel owner. We shall never know by there seemed to be a racial element involved in this.
- Jeff Beck – Truth
Jeff Beck was one of the world’s great innovative guitarists. He came from my neck of the woods in the Deep South of the Thames Delta and played in one of my local groups – The Tridents – before going on to replace Clapton in the Yardbirds. His arrival sparked the most experimental and dynamic style of the band as they moved from R&B and Pop into psychedelia. Beck’s guitar-work was highly original and innovative and drove the band into a new level. They became widely accepted on the emerging Underground scene as a serious band.
Then it all started falling apart just when it should have been at its best. The Yardbirds had taken on Jimmy Page and had the most incredible double lead guitar attack ever. However it was not to be. Jeff started becoming inconsistent and the band fell apart. Jimmy took the remnants off with him to form Led Zeppelin. Keith went off to Renaissance and Jeff went off to go solo and then form the Jeff Beck Group. That band consisted of John Stewart on vocals, Ronnie Wood on bass and Micky Waller on drums. It was an incredible line-up.
I saw them play a couple of times and Jeff was always stunning on guitar though I never hugely liked John’s vocals.
This album ‘Truth’ is one of the great albums of British Progressive Rock. It features a number of great progressive bluesy and psychedelic numbers alongside some delicate workings of traditional songs like ‘Greensleeve’ and psyched out ‘Ole’ Man River’ which I always thought were a little incongruous though they seemed to work and gave the album another dimension.
The album starts with a version of the Yardbirds ‘Shapes of things’ in a very different psychedelic arrangement. Then there was a version of Tim Roses’ ‘Morning Dew’ and ‘Beck’s Bolero’ along with some blues favourites ‘Rock my plimsoul’ (which was a psyched out version of Rock me baby), ‘I ain’t superstitious’ and ‘You shook me’. They were all given the Beck treatment.
It was widely recognised as one of the major albums of the Progressive scene.
- Dale Hawkins – Oh Suzie Q
In 1957 Dale Hawkins recorded ‘Suzie Q’. It was not quite like anything else. It took the Rockabilly of Elvis and married to the swamp-blues of Louisiana. The result was a bluesy guitar solo, muddy beat with cowbells and a swampy style of Rock.
He followed it up with good Rockabilly tracks like ‘Juanita’ and ‘Tornado’ which both had some of the elements but did not catch that magic of the ‘Suzie Q’ brand of Swamp Rock.
‘Oh Suzie Q’ gathers those tracks together with a rocked up version of Little Walters ‘My Baby’ and some other strong songs ‘Four letter word (Rock)’ and ‘Wild, Wild World’.
If only Dale could have developed that initial Swamp Rock into something more he would have been as big as Elvis. Unfortunately his other material was good but not quite as good.
- Big Mama Thornton – The Original Hound Dog
Big Mama Thornton was a big lady with a really big voice. She was outrageous for her time often dressing as a man in her stage act. Like a number of R&B artists she came into secular music from a background of Gospel.
A lot of her early fifties output was good hard hitting R&B like ‘I smell a rat’ (covered by White Stripes) ‘They call me Big Mama’ and ‘You don’t move me no more. But there were two tracks that she is best remembered for. The first of these was ‘Hound Dog’. Big Mama was the first to record this Lieber & Stoller classic as early as 1952. She belted the song out to a great guitar backing and great R&B beat complete with yelps and whoops. It prompted a response song (quite common during those days) from Rufus Thomas on Sun Records and then was later rocked up by Elvis. The second was a slower bluesier song called ‘Ball and chain’. Big Mama Thornton did a really soulful version of this but it gained much more prominence when Janis Joplin turned it into an anguished gutsy song that often stole the show with the intensity she put into it.
Big Mama remains a seminal force. The original Hound Dog collection together most of her early tracks.
- Nuggets – Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968
When the British invasion took place in 1964 the Americans were shocked. They had no response. It was as if they had been invaded by aliens and did not understand the new language. However, it did not take them long to start to respond. All over the continent kids started growing their hair and forming bands. The country exploded with a plethora of new bands. Many of them were clones of British bands but many more were original and different. As the 1960s progressed these bands developed with it so that when the style turned to psychedelia they did their own versions.
There were hundreds of these bands. Every town and city had flourishing little flocks of them all playing to their mates in the local clubs and doing their best to pull the girls. Most of them died away without leaving any trace. Some recorded the odd single which might have sold locally and a few managed to secure major label contracts.
Because this music was rehearsed in their parents garages and was performed by young kids it began to be called Garage Punk.
It would probably have languished unheard collecting dust on shelves in those same garages and occasionally being dusted off for a sentimental nostalgic evening between old friends if it wasn’t for two men. Jack Holzman (founder of Elektra records) and Lenny Kaye (later the lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group) had the bright idea of tracking down a number of these lesser known tracks and putting them out on a double album. At the time they thought it would be an interesting project and had no idea that in the process they would create a number of distinct genres, spark a wave of interest, and have far reaching effects further down the line. They called it Nuggets because they were collecting all those fairly obscure nuggets of music from that rich vein of the 1960s.
In actual fact it was rather a strange eclectic collection of fairly disparate recordings, some of which were quite big hits, some of which were obscure, and involving a wide range of styles. They were not really all Garage Bands or Garage Punk as Lenny described them. What they did do was spark an enormous amount of interest that started that snowball rolling down the mountainside picking up the debris from the sixties as it gained momentum until it exploded on the scene with the force of a nuclear avalanche.
The album Nuggets spawned other albums and album sets – Boulders, Pebbles, Chocolate Soup for Diabetics, High in the Mid 60s, Fading Yellow, and on and on and on. I was running a History f Rock Music course back in the 1980s as an Adult Education Course and one of my students was so smitten with Nuggets that he specialised in Garage Punk and started collecting Vinyl albums. He was a young man with disposable cash and by the end of the two year course he had amassed two thousand five hundred albums of Garage Punk Bands, compilations and related material!
On the Pop side there were the Castaways, Knickerbockers and Barbarians. On the Psychedelic side there were the Electric Prunes, Seeds, Count Five, Chocolate Watch Band and Cryan’ Shames. On the Garage Punk side you had the Leaves, Premiers and Standells. On the psyched out Bluesy side you had the Amboy Dukes, Shadows of knight and Blues Magoos. On the really weird psychedelic Punk you had the Magic Mushrooms and Mouse & the Traps. Etc.
It was an inspired choice.
Whether you agree with the choices or not you’ll love the journey.
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