This is the one where I piss off a margin of Stones fans, earn the respect of another (considerably smaller) margin of Stones fans, and find myself on the receiving end of sheer indifference from all other Stones fans.
This album is one of the most divisive records ever put out. My father calls it "A poor man's Sgt. Pepper" and notes that the use of drugs is a lot more obvious here than on The Beatles' album (I disagree with the quote, but he's probably dead right on that last one.) For its defenders, it was a step in the logical direction after Aftermath and Between The Buttons, a sign of their edge for experimentation. For others, this is proof that the band had lost their way, trying a little too hard to keep with the times.
Yes, and what was Some Girls? Oh, wait, that was just more of what they SHOULD have been doing instead of the aimless mid-tempo sludge that dominated their 1970's output and earned them the disparaging dinosaur title from the punks.
(Gee, you really need to guess where I stand on Their Satanic Majesties Request?)
I love this album. Get these notions of Pepper or Forever Changes or even Safe As Milk out of your head. Hell, if it helps, pretend it's NOT The Rolling Stones. If this had been some one-off by a British underground band, it would be the object of the respect it deserves. Anyway, do whatever it takes to approach this album with an open mind, because there's not a trace of the band's blues roots to be found.
And that's okay.
Maybe this album's bad reputation says more about the average (let me emphasize AVERAGE) Stones fan than The Rolling Stones themselves. There's something to be said about the resemblance between "Brown Sugar" and "Rough Justice" or the fact that damn near every album since Let It Bleed has featured some rewrite of "Gimme Shelter" - though "Brown Sugar," "Rocks Off," and "Dancing With Mr. D" are all great in their own regards - in one shape or another, yes, but they also play to audience expectations. Here they are, sounding unlike their previous works...and it stands hated, in the shadow of its (overrated, but still good) cousin, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The album spent a long time gestating in the studio, mainly because of Mick, Keith, and Brian all enjoying their share of legal troubles. It was during this period that the notorious bust - on orders to "wait until the Beatle [George Harrison] leaves" - on a party at Keith's home caused a massive scandal, thus beginning The Rolling Stones' career-spanning affair as tabloid fodder (I recommend David Dalton's 1981 book for its compilation of Stones tabloid headlines - amazing stuff), from where Marianne Faithful put that Mars bar to what Mick Jagger was doing with it...yeah.
By this point, Brian Jones was on the brink. His legal tangles kept the band from obtaining travel visas to the States, which on some level I'm led to understand played a small role in the case for his dismissal in 1969. He makes some great contributions to this album, but after that his role in the band is fairly dubious. A slide guitar here, an autoharp there...but that was it. He withered away, and it really was tragic. I can be a cynical asshole (as I was in my entry on Aftermath) and say it was his fault for squandering his talent, but at the end of the day it won't change the fact that his own demons ended his life at 27.
One of Keith's best moments (which is saying something) is in this 1973 interview, himself in the throes of a heroin addiction and discussing Brian's passing:
This album really does mark the end of an era for them. More so than Altamont, I think. For me, Altamont didn't end the 1960's - it was the beginning of the 1970's and the image The Rolling Stones had as this dangerous force, quite possibly with the Devil on their side. This is The Rolling Stones' dying days of the innocence of their youth. Until this point, they'd been troublemakers, the scruffian alternative to The Beatles, and one of the best blues bands in England. They partied, they did drugs, but at that point in time it was all still fun and games. No one had died yet.
The high point of the album comes with "2,000 Light Years From Home," which I interpret as an illustration of the dark side to the so-called rebellion that came with turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. You find it gets awful lonely, so many light years from home. For me, there was always something inherently nasty brooding underneath the surface of flower power. It would come to manifest itself with the great unrest of 1968 in Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Prague. It was as if The Rolling Stones were able to see through the bullshit and know that this wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
All this, without becoming washed-up acid casualties in the process, some great work still ahead of them.
01. Sing This All Together [10]
This song is great fun. As its title suggests, it isn't too hard to sing along with. There are some great African-derived rhythms (no doubt influenced from Jagger, Richards, and Jones' trip to Morocco) on this track in the interlude, with some buried fuzz guitar. The brass arrangement is both punchy and a perfect tone to accompany the song's middle section. It doesn't grab you and shake you by the collars the way Sir Paul introduces the boys from the Lonely Hearts Club or Billy Shears, but it works in its own way. The Beatles want you to sit back and watch the show, but The Rolling Stones want you to join in on the fun, "Open [y]our heads and let pictures come." Hell, they even have Lennon and McCartney joining in on backing vocals!
02. Citadel [9]
This song is a great mix of some great guitar riffing (I especially love the second guitar that drops in for a little bit in the left channel), sax, mellotron, I think some flute, harpsichord, an atmosphere of percussion, and Charlie Watts playing a staggered drum beat like a warped twist on "My Obsession" from the previous album before hitting his stride in the majestic choruses. Who said psychedelic music had to be all "Nights In White Satin" (one of the best songs of its genre) or "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" (blech - more like "A Whiter Shade Of Pail," which I usually need nearby when that snooze-fest comes on) or "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"? This song rocks, just try to ignore the lyrics:
"Candy and Cathy, hope you both are well
Please come see me in the citadel."
Yikes. Not quite the Carroll-esque imagery of Lennon's psychedelic compositions (which I rank as his best right behind his "I just discovered Dylan" phase, which I mean as a high compliment), now is it? At least the music paints a wonderful picture.
Since YouTube has been the subject of scrutiny from the legal teams at more than a few major labels, I couldn't find every single song from this album. So, here's The Damned doing their cover of "Citadel."
03. In Another Land [10]
Uh...whoa. That was definitely The Rolling Stones on "Citadel," and we could at least pick out Mick Jagger on "Sing This All Together," but who the Hell is this?
This is actually sort of a big deal, being a song written and sung by bassist Bill Wyman. That's right, folks, the band was so keen to experiment in the studio that Mick and Keith let up their monkey grip (get it?) on the songwriting end that they let someone else have a go. The story goes that Bill, the straight-edged member of the band (in all fairness, this was a dual title held with Charlie until the 1980's when he quietly checked himself into rehab for a drug & drink addiction; to further counter that, though, sticking up for my drummer brethren, Charlie has the distinction of being the only monogamous Stone) was the only member to show up to the studio.
He laid down this song just the same, with some help from session man Nicky Hopkins on keyboards and two members of The Small Faces, Steve Marriott (who played acoustic guitar on the song as well) and Ronnie Lane (later to join The Faces with another guy named Ronnie and a guy named Rod). It turns out Mick and Keith liked the song, and it wound up on the album after they added backing vocals alongside Ronnie and Steve, Charlie added drums, and Brian added a mellotron part.
That in itself is one thing, but how is the end product?
It's actually a fabulous song. Bill has a good voice, though he's effected the shit out of it here. With the chant-like lyrics of the opener and the pure psychedelic gloop that make up the words to "Citadel," you might not expect much. Don't short change yourself, these lyrics are tongue-in-cheek. I've always seen this as a send-up of the psychedelic mode of songwriting - especially the third verse, where he twists the dream imagery of the earlier verses of everything being blue and feathers floating around everywhere:
"We heard the trumpets blow and the sky turned red
When I accidentally said that I didn't know
How I came to be here, not fast asleep in bed.
I stood and held your hand.
And nobody else's hand will ever do,
Nobody else's hand.
Then I awoke, was this some kind of joke?
I opened up my eyes.
Much to my surprise."
The song ends with the sound of Bill snoring, tacked onto the song as a joke by Mick and Keith, who recorded the bassist snoring when he fell asleep during a late night session. A truly unique moment for the band, and one of their most memorable songs.
[Side note: Bill Wyman was the first Stone to put out a solo album, then a second, even a third before Mick or Keith got sick enough of each other to do their own. In fact, all three of these albums - Monkey Grip (1974), Stone Alone (1976), and Bill Wyman (1982) can all be found on one collection, The Bill Wyman Compendium. It had the misfortune of being released on 9/11/01. His solo material is quite good, but only on the grounds that you don't expect to hear Stonesy songs with a different singer. He's also got a keen sense of humor, and as the band's historian has published two excellent books, Stone Alone and Rolling With The Stones. He quit the band in 1992.]
04. 2000 Man [10]
(Yes, this was the only clip I could find. All I can say is I love the Internet.)
Back to Mick and Keith, and this one's got some weird lyrics..."I am having an affair with a random computer." It's about life in the future, but apparently it's okay to have sex with computers. It starts off with a tentative folky feel before its rocking second half. Kiss later covered it, cock-rocking it to the max, and I don't mean that in a good way. The nuances of the original are nowhere to be found in their less than delicate treatment. Oh, well. The original is great, making me wonder just how this would have been done live had they been able to tour. I bet it would have been one of the showstoppers.
05. Sing This All Together (See What Happens) [7]
Is anyone else experiencing deja vu? Not just with this song being a meditation on the opening track, but with The Rolling Stones ending the otherwise stellar A-side of an LP with a song that is maybe a little too long?
In all fairness, it isn't as bad as "Going Home." It isn't great, but it's certainly not awful. One thing I'll give it is that it is really well-done as a work of production, with all these musical colors drifting in and out without drowning the production. (I should probably go ahead and mention that Mick and Keith produced this album alone.)
First of all, listen to this song with headphones. You'll just notice more, like for example at 0:22 in the song, you can hear Mick say, "Where's that joint?" A perfect summary of the next eight minutes. Very trippy, druggy number. It has the feel of being in the desert at night, just you, the sand, and the stars...that or doing lots of drugs. Plenty of good instrumental moments from the mellotron, some guitar/brass interplay, a glockenspiel, and a piano dueling with a spaghetti western flute. At the seven-minute mark, the verse from the opening track is resurrected before the song ends with forty seconds of white noise.
It's a trip, not always enjoyable, but solid.
06. She's A Rainbow [10]
I still have no idea what the Hell is going on with this song's intro - is it a carnival game? Ah, it doesn't matter. This is a terrific little pop song, dipped in a bottle of lysergic and served to you on a sugar cube. Ok, it isn't really that psychedelic, but it wouldn't fit in anywhere else in the band's catalog.
How do Stones fans feel about this song? I shamelessly love it, the innocent piano from Nicky Hopkins, some well-used strings in the verses, some must-have-been-embarrassing-to-record backing vocals, and a mellotron that up until (literally) three minutes ago I had always thought was a saxophone. But then I heard an instrumental mix of this song from the sessions...nope. Definitely a mellotron. Good drumming here, too, nice fills. There's a beautiful piano/string solo spot in the middle of the song, and I love the pomposity-deflation that occurs with the violins sawing around the stereo soundscape around 3:55.
Pop music was never really The Rolling Stones' thing...but damn, they NAILED it here!
07. The Lantern [5.5]
Maybe the reason I thought Aftermath had such a dull B-side was because this album has two back-to-back clunkers on its flipside. This one suffers from a horrible production job, to the point that I could chalk it up as being an error in the mixing. But it isn't. The drums and piano in the left channel are barely there, and it doesn't sound good. This means that even though the guitar might really be just a hair too loud in the right channel, with the other instruments so...absent, the guitar might as well be gunshots. Very jarring. Pretty subdued brass contribution - they sound dazed, drugged-out...if that was their intention, they did too good a job with this overlong number - though it boasts some nice brass parts at the end - that never really gains momentum, let alone that it can barely maintain what little momentum it has. Ho-hum.
08. Gomper [7]
This song is unremarkable for the first 125 seconds. It isn't terrible, but it certainly isn't memorable, never quite capturing my attention. Its Indian roots are a little too obvious a cue from The Beatles, I guess. But then at 2:05 comes a really cool jam, led by a flute. The best part? The entire jam was played by Brian Jones via overdubs.
Lots of world music flavor, showing broader influence than - dare I say it? - Sgt. Pepper! (Cue suspenseful music.)
No, seriously, it's got some great motifs of African and Middle-Eastern music. The trip to Morocco, where Brian and actress Anita Pallenberg broke up and Keith took up with her - Brian's own behavior being so boorish apparently that Mick, Marianne, Keith, and Anita ditched Brian without any prior notice - must have had a profound effect on their musical interests.
Even long after the psychedelic Stones were dead and buried...Hell, even on the opening cut of Beggar's Banquet, the incomparable "Sympathy For The Devil," what starts the song but the percussion of conga player Rocky Dijon? The prototype of "Brown Sugar," a song co-written by Mick Jagger and Jones' replacement Mick Taylor called "I'm Going Down" (heard on the 1975 Decca cash-in Metamorphosis) has a dense conga arrangement near the end. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?" off Sticky Fingers has a pretty good layering of percussion throughout its jamming coda.
09. 2000 Light Years From Home [11]
The Rolling Stones' psychedelic masterpiece. It's got a great message on the savage underbelly of the idealism of flower power: "It's so very lonely, you're a hundred/six hundred/a thousand/two thousand light years from home." The rest of the song is about space travel...but this isn't the goofy retro-futurist space travel we saw in 1950's sci-fi. No, this was the dark, gloomy outer space, the realistic visions of alien landscapes as bleak and desolate as anything on Earth. The lyrics were written by Mick Jagger during his stint in jail amid all the drug trials of the time, further underlining the sense of isolation.
After the eerie intro of backwards piano and a guitar riff accompanied by mellotron, off we go, the engines of the band thrusting us onward and upward. This is the first time since "Citadel" that they actually sound like a band, and that feels like ages ago by this point. "2000 Light Years From Home" is the only song on Their Satanic Majesties Request that lives up to the sinister implications of its title. Amazing. Truly amazing.
Long, long ago when I was in elementary school, my 4th grade class did a play called "Food Wars," a nutrition-centric spoof of Star Wars. Our teacher asked us to bring in "outer space music" to use as intro and outro music for our performances. I brought in this song. I was told it was too weird. What did she choose instead? Why, Meco's disco-tastic treatment of the Star Wars theme, naturally!
Their loss.
10. On With The Show [9]
This song isn't as memorable as I once thought it was. Otherwise it would be a ten, hands-down. It is much-needed after the last song, Mick putting on the affect of a posh cabaret emcee - "We've got all the awnsuhs!". There is a little break at 1:05, before the song can really go anywhere, I'm assuming to emulate a striptease act? The song's last minute also carries on the same vibe, with plenty of indiscernible bar chatter. My favorite is at the end where a lady says with a Texan accent, "I hope you didn't record any of this!" and Mick's prompt reply is, "No, we didn't." And that, friends, is every reason why I love The Rolling Stones.
Subtotal: 88.5% B+
Replayability Factor: 1
It had been three years since I last heard this album, popping into my head only because I found myself wanting to hear "Citadel" again. I really have to be in a specific mood to hear it. As just background music - though many Stones albums DO make for perfect background music - it's got too much going on, deserving a closer listen. Besides, if you aren't in the mood for this sort of thing, "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)" can be the most annoying shit in the world.
Consistency Factor: 0
Um...sorry on this one. My guideline is that an album earning "It's for the die-hard fan" status gets zero points for this tilt factor. I think it's a great album...but it doesn't stand for comparison to something like Sticky Fingers. That's like comparing Rubber Soul to Never Mind The Bollocks. Two great albums, but in wildly different ways. And Stones fan or not, this is not an accessible record. There are albums by The Residents more accessible than this.
External Factors: 1
Not giving them the two was difficult, based solely on the merits of "I'll give you an A for effort." This is a mesmerizing album, the last of their great innovative works. They push the envelope as much as possible, more than a few of these songs actually possessing what Frank Zappa called "NO COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL" on The Mothers' first album, Freak Out!
Unfortunately, sometimes they go too far. Not in terms of them getting too experimental, but the self-production (most noticeably on "The Lantern") was a sign that the boys shouldn't venture over to the other side of the control room window alone. They'd have Jimmy Miller for the next few albums, maybe you've heard them?
Beggars' Banquet (1968)
Let It Bleed (1969)
Sticky Fingers (1971)
Exile On Main Street (1972)
Goats Head Soup (1973)
Mick and Keith would man the production chair again on 1974's It's Only Rock 'N' Roll, and guess what? It sounds like shit. Thankfully, they got a little better at producing in time for Some Girls. Anyway, the production is at its best really bold (in the case of the layering of "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)" and the chilling work on "2000 Light Years From Home") and at its worst unnecessarily and unintentionally lo-fi dreck ("The Lantern," the first half of "Gomper.")
This also marked their first release without Andrew Oldham in the picture. He left as their manager mid-year. It's strange, the bizarre parallels with The Beatles: both groups lost their managers and proceeded with what most writers consider missteps (this album, with The Beatles it was Magical Mystery Tour) that I somehow think are overlooked and underrated. One major difference, though: while The Beatles, depending on which member of the band you asked, were doomed the moment Brian Epstein went the way of the Norwegian Blue parrot (I don't agree with that at all), The Rolling Stones flourished in the new-found freedom that came without the control Mr. Oldham had exerted on the band.
Two steps forward: great album, ditch the manager...and one step back: crummy production job and some unimaginative lyrics/songs.
TOTAL: 90.5% A-
Singles / Non-LP:
Before we do the singles, let's visit a US-only compilation entitled Flowers, released in August 1967. I don't want to go off on some stupid rant, but the US/UK disparity in releases for The Rolling Stones is Byzantine. Buy all the UK albums, you're still missing a good chunk of songs, from songs released only in the US (there's a few) to different mixes to, oh yeah, the singles. No "Paint It Black." No "Ruby Tuesday." Buy all the US albums and you're missing about an album's worth of songs trimmed from the UK releases to make room for the singles. Plus, you're buying more albums, and albums around 30 minutes in length, at that. In short, ABKCO was run by a crook - a feller by the name of Allen Klein, you may know him for some of his other exploits - and they did very little to remedy this problem with the CD reissues.
God, at least with The Beatles we had Past Masters, which gave us the singles, the ONE exclusive EP's worth of tracks, and the ONE US-only tune ("Bad Boy") in two healthy installments. (By the way, two days from now the remasters are coming out. Holy Shit.)
That said, Flowers was surprisingly balanced for a US compilation. Sure, the US listener had "Ruby Tuesday," "Let's Spend The Night Together," and "Lady Jane" from the albums, but "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?" was given a proper release, along with ALL of the songs trimmed off Aftermath (all five of them) and Between The Buttons, plus three unreleased songs for good measure. I'm enumerating them based on their track listing on the original LP.
06. My Girl [7]
Dating from the early/mid 1965 sessions for the Out Of Our Heads album (their third UK album, their fourth in the US), this is the "My Girl" you're probably thinking of. It's pretty faithful to the original, though the string break is nowhere near as ornate as The Temptations' version. Mick doesn't have the inflection or emotion of the original, and the song drags as a result. But it isn't a terrible cover, though history would not have been kind to it had it been given a proper album/single release, as the original "My Girl" has entered the public lexicon as one of the best popular songs to come from America, ever.
11. Ride On, Baby [9]
Recorded for Aftermath in late 1965, this shows just how far they'd come from doing soul covers in their spare time. This is a driven, rocking number, with some kick-ass timekeeping from Charlie. This should have been on the album! As with "Out Of Time" and "Take It Or Leave It," this song was done by Mick Jagger's friend Chris Farlowe.
12. Sittin' On A Fence [9]
The Rolling Stones do The Kinks? Though it's a Jagger/Richards original, this song could have been plugged into a certain little green amp (but keep the harpsichord) and wouldn't have been at all out of place on (sigh, I hate this title) The Kink Kontroversy or Face To Face. Comparison to The Kinks aside, this is a lovely little acoustic country song, with some nice finger work on Keith's part and Brian on harpsichord. This, too, should have been released. It was a hit for Immediate Records duo Twice As Much. They didn't go too far.
Next comes the actual single from the time...
01. We Love You [10]
This was Mick and Keith's message of thanks to their fans and friends in the press who voiced their support during their drug trials. John and Paul are present on backing vocals (on both side of this single, in fact). The Who pledged to keep releasing their own takes of Stones songs until the two were released (managing to squeeze out "Under My Thumb" b/w "The Last Time" before they indeed were free men). Monkees Mike Nesmith and Micky Dolenz wore black armbands in support of Mick and Keith during their tour of England.
Great. So how's the song? Amazing! The drums, the mellotron, the backing vocals, it's all one big sound. Very cacophonous production, perfect for the song.
Try not to look directly into Brian Jones' eyes. You might catch a contact high. Jesus.
Here it is again, shorter, with the image flipped horizontally, but it's IN COLOR! That's another thing, can they not just put this stuff out on a DVD? I guess that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? Wait till I put up the promo film for "Jumpin' Jack Flash."
02. Dandelion [10]
In the midst of the "Summer of Love," The Rolling Stones pulled off a song that teeters on being kick-ass rock and acid-soaked naivety. It's a beautiful song - love the oboe solo - and there really is an innocence to this song, however imagined it might have actually been, that showed just how much respite there truly was to psychedelia, with the death of Camelot and Watts on one end, and all the turmoil of 1968 through Watergate and Hanoi on the other side. Hunter S. Thompson put it best:
"...[t]he middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave..."
Though the late Mr. Thompson's quote ties more into the culture of America than England, its message is universal. Idealism reigned supreme. I guess knowing what horrors lurked around the corner from the peace and love scenes of 1967 gives such a bittersweet air to a song as pretty as "Dandelion." Who cares? I was born twenty years after it was released, and that's how I always knew it. I recall hearing it and thinking this song was quite happy for a band with such a dark and murky story. I was nine years old, and I knew it then.
"We Love You" b/w "Dandelion" is a Hell of a single, better than "Penny Lane" by a long shot. If only the middle of side B of Satanic Majesties had carried on the momentum, there wouldn't have been any doubt that The Rolling Stones put out two marvelous albums in 1967. Oh, well. It was what it was, love it or hate it. I'm sticking to my original statement: I love this album.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
David Bowie - "Heroes" (1977)
Somewhere in between the preparation for my review of The Who's A Quick One and now my fiance Shelley and I came up with the idea of the artistic spectrum of style versus substance. There isn't much science to it, in fact it's highly subjective (hey! just like this blog!) and based off of a very cliched phrase.
Whatever.
Anyway, the question of "who/what next" for this blog came up. Two (already?) weeks ago, I had my heart dead-set on doing Re-Ac-Tor (1981) by Neil Young, mainly because I couldn't fathom why the reviews I've read are so damned indifferent towards it. However, I also promised myself to cover all bases before I began re-treading on certain artists. Yes, there will be plenty of Kinks. There will be a good amount of Zappa (85 albums and counting? The guy's been more prolific in death than Tupac!), Beatles, Stones, Neil, Dylan...but then I thought of David Bowie.
Bowie is one of those artists I've always liked, yet I've never been absolutely obsessed with. On this made-up spectrum, he's always struck me as someone with plenty of style...but what about substance? I'd never really thought about it. I realized I'd never given much thought to his lyrics. And even when I did, it was his glam stuff, which is either telling a story - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972) and Diamond Dogs (1974) - rather meaningless, deliberately cut-up lyrics on Aladdin Sane (1973), or someone else's tunes on Pin-Ups (1973).
Then again, I never really went through a David Bowie "phase." I tended to pick his stuff up sporadically. (Kind of like how I've been meaning to pick up Lou Reed's Transformer album for almost seven years.) In 2003, I picked up Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, a year before I'd copied Ziggy Stardust from my local library and put it on a CD-R alongside Electric Warrior by T. Rex, in late 2004 I bought Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980) on a whim along with Black And Blue by The Rolling Stones (ugh.), and in early 2005 I bought Low and "Heroes" together. Near the end of that year I'd come into a bit of extra money and bought eleven CD's, including The Man Who Sold The World (1970), Hunky Dory (1971), Pin-Ups (1973), and Lodger (1979).
Is this normal for you, the reader? Because when I got into The Kinks, I GOT INTO The Kinks. I saved my lunch money, ventured to 13th Floor Music, and did my business about once or twice a month. Same with Zappa: I trudged on, buying all his budget releases (the ones with the "Cheap Thrills" sticker, priced at $11 where most of his stuff was $17) until...I don't really know. I guess fatigue? I got into American punk music in a big way, then Cheap Trick...
Enough of this nostalgic codswallop.
Something had to be the key to his success beyond his ability to project a series of iconic images. There had to be some reason Charles Shaar Murray, a UK music critic whose judgment I trust - a LOT - is as big a Bowie fan as he is Zappa or The Kinks, right?
After kicking around what was little more than a four-year old mental image (image? Let's go with aural footprint...), I did what I should have done: I re-listened to him. Don't get me wrong, I still find Pin-Ups to be laughably bad for the most part, though a really tight EP could have been culled from it. (One song that would make my cut would be his treatment of a Kinks gem called "Where Have All The Good Times Gone?") I still turn seasick green every single time I hear that plasticine close-miked sax on the awful title track from Young Americans (1975). And dear God, don't get me started on that video for "Dancing In The Street."
But then I hear him on a good day, as with this album - the second of two he did in 1977, a year of great albums all across the board unless you were Ringo or Keef - I feel like an idiot for ever doubting his capability of greatness. Is he a god among men? No, that's why I put that little qualifier at the end there. After his "Berlin Trilogy" of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger - some making an extension with Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) - that was pretty much it, until Earthling in 1997, helped in no small part by Trent Reznor and the fifty-eight different remixes of "I'm Afraid Of Americans" he put out.
Of course, every artist has hit the skids. At least once. If they didn't, they either died (you seriously want me to name names? Jimi, Janis, Duane, Buddy, Sid...), broke up (The Beatles), or were able to triumph over their struggle to make a great album (less common, but The Kinks, with the case of the Lola album and its leading single's success saving their career). In his course on The Beatles, at least twice (before the Get Back sessions and before the lawsuit fest that was the break-up of the band) Glenn Gass would joke, "...and after that they all moved to an island somewhere and are still making great music!" Then he would realistically counter that with, "Look, we should be grateful they broke up when they did. It had to happen, and sure, certain things may have sped it up [Apple, Allen Klein, Yoko], but could you imagine The Beatles' disco album?"
He has a point. Neil Young revived his career in the late 1970's with this very notion - "It's better to burn out / Than it is to rust" - but they'd run their course. As a collective, they weren't able to agree on much, except maybe wanting to lynch Paul. Other than their immediate solo releases, I don't feel any of them recaptured their former glory (and even then, I have to say All Things Must Pass is a rockist's Viagra, bloated, overproduced, and what was up with the third disc?). Bowie has gone in and out of vogue a few times. Given his later start, and his intermittent hiatuses from recording (it's been six years since his last album, Reality), he doesn't quite have the borderline unapproachable juggernaut discography of Neil, Dylan, or Zappa.
Yet he's just as legendary, and rightfully so. He's rock and roll's great chameleon, visually and stylistically. Sure, Zappa bounced around rock, jazz, and classical like it was a game of Pong, and Dylan's gone through more phases than the Soviet government, but Bowie kept it accessible, appealing, and endlessly fascinating. Glam Bowie, for me, is hit and miss. I love side B of Ziggy Stardust plus "Starman" and "Five Years," but Aladdin Sane doesn't do too much for me. At all. Pin-Ups is a very bumpy covers album. His "I Can't Explain" is brittle and slow, his vocals on "Friday On My Mind" waif-like, but his version of "See Emily Play" thumps along with the kind of swagger the rest of the album tries for, but fails.
It's not a requirement, but I really do feel one has to approach glam with - there's no way to say this politely - part of their brain shut off. What I mean is that it's fun, campy, often funny...but don't expect Dylanesque portraits, Daviesian commentary, or Zappaesque humor. It's fun to listen to and play along with, but the real draw, as for its cultural relevance, was the outright willingness to do a piss-take on gender roles. Mick Jagger was, at one point in time, considered macho - this was before the studded velour jumpsuit he donned on their 1973 tour - and guys like Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Rod Stewart, and on down the line were the beautiful faces of the men of rock and roll.
Then came this weirdo with a permanently dilated pupil, a shocking red mullet, no eyebrows, and...he - or she? - is kinda cute. Or handsome. Cute? This mysterious person is wearing makeup...
Alice Cooper wore makeup, too, but he went for the schlock horror look after a glam image for his first three albums (none of which garnered attention commercially, though they are pretty good). Even then, there's no doubt - in spite of the name - that Alice Cooper was a dude. Pretty manly-looking fellow.
But this scrawny little humanoid with the makeup and the mullet? And what's this business of singing about being an alien? Is he/she/it an alien?
I don't mean to belabor the point. You get it, I hope. It was all Bowie's concoction, that it would garner a bunch of interest if he donned this mysterious persona and said he was gay at a time where it really was shocking, in spite of what the religious right may suggest these days. But it was an artistic phase. He grew out of it, with the terrific Diamond Dogs (1974) marking the midpoint in his shift from glam-rock to soul/funk. This marked what's called his Thin White Duke phase.
Though I can say I hate what I've heard off Young Americans, which gave him a hit with "Fame," a song co-written with John Lennon (and as far as I'm concerned, the only reason it got attention), I did enjoy Station To Station (1976). The soul (technically blue-eyed Philly soul, merging two of my least-favorite musical sounds together) of Young Americans was *sniff* heavily dusted with *sniff* some sort of *rubs nose frantically* magic white powder, giving *nose begins to bleed* a mysterious, darker, avant-garde edge to the music. It was actually the influence of German acts like Kraftwerk, NEU!, Can, and Faust, though I'm sure doings lines of Bolivian marching powder helped to bolster the almost sterile - in a good way, not a Dark Side Of The Moon way - sound of Station To Station.
Living off of cocaine and red peppers - and little else - Bowie got skinny, moody, and super paranoid. Convinced occultists wanted to perform rituals on his excrement, he collected his piss in mason jars, which he stored in the refrigerator. He famously declared England should have a dictator. He rather infamously got his picture taken while standing in the backseat of a Mercedes giving a Hitler salute outside Victoria Station.
Not the best time in his personal life. He may have had his big United States breakthrough (commercially, though he had his Stateside admirers since Ziggy), but if he'd kept it up he would have gone the way of so many.
It came to a head one day, when as he delicately put it in a not-at-all-disgusting way, "I went to blow my nose and half me brains came out." He, musician pal Brian Eno (ex-Roxy Music), and producer Tony Visconti (who deserves to be in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, but no, we'd rather lobby for Brian Epstein coaxing The Beatles into Pierre Cardin suits) went to Europe to record the three albums now called his "Berlin Trilogy," consisting of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger. I consider these to be Bowie at his best and his most experimental (anytime you've got Brian Eno on board, it will be so-and-so at their most experimental, and that's a great thing). One of the truly great trilogies of rock and roll, right up there with electric Dylan, Neil's trip to the ditch, The Kinks' "British" albums from the late 1960's, you name it.
Though the introspective therapy would come with Scary Monsters, the album after Lodger, Bowie is certainly shaking the specter of drugs off his back. Parts of Low and all of "Heroes" were recorded at Hansa Studio in Berlin, which just happens to be adjacent to the Berlin Wall. The tension of the location - and the politics of the region - seemed to manifest itself in the music. Side A of Low consists (almost) entirely of lyrical pieces, all relatively short...and side B is four of the gloomiest instrumentals I'd heard until I discovered there was an entire genre based off of this sound. (Meaning, naturally, in the 30 years since then there's only been gloomier, creepier sounding shit, and it's brilliant - I recommend Veil Of Secrecy for some great, dark ambient music.)
"Heroes" isn't unlike Low, though the differences are obvious. Both still have the same lyrical/instrumental divide, though the second album closes with a lyrical track (while the first album begins with an instrumental). It may be less dark - though "Sense Of Doubt" shows it wasn't all flushed out of the system - but I think it's the artier of the pair. The musical palate is broad, especially on side B. Given everything else that came out in 1977, including this album's older brother Low, it was pretty bold for the New Musical Express to give this record "Album Of The Year."
Do I agree with that honor? Eh...not quite, but it's pretty stiff competition with Cheap Trick's first (and best) album, the rise of UK punk, debuts from Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads, oh, yeah, and The Kinks returning from Preservation land and putting out their first non-conceptual or thematic or operatic album in (literally) a decade. (Sure, they're my favorite band, but I won't deny their occasional inaccessibility! See also: Zappa, Frank.)
These albums showed Bowie was more than just an image. There was always a bit of substance beneath that style, he just seemed too busy reinterpreting the Christ myth on Ziggy Stardust, Orwell on Diamond Dogs, or using a lyrical technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs on Aladdin Sane. There's plenty of references to the Bible and the Occult on Station To Station, but here on the Berlin albums it's obvious for everyone to see.
The weirdo with the dilated pupil shed all exterior personae and gave us the weirdo with the dilated pupil, the artist. I can forget about his crap-tastic duet with Mick Jagger on "Dancing In The Street." I can forgive him for Labyrinth. At his best, he's more than just a performer. He's a composer, the writer of one of the greatest rock anthems ever, and - after a closer examination - a terrific poet.
Style over substance, my shiny metal ass.
01. Beauty And The Beast [10]
An excellent opening track, with a tense build-up of an intro. The resulting release of tension doesn't lose a drop of momentum. Its lyrics, about Bowie's split personality as a result of his drug use, are matched by the savagery of Robert Fripp's scorching guitar leads. The robotic drums do fills only when absolutely necessary...an amazing track.
02. Joe The Lion [7]
I like the dueling lead guitar parts throughout the song...but it's only listenable on headphones. Otherwise it sounds like you're listening to two songs at the same time. Musically, I would say this song meanders a little too much. Very danceable beat, but what's with the spoken intro in the middle? The lyrics are apparently about Chris Burden - hence the "nail me to a car" line - the performance artist who was nailed to a Volkswagen in 1971 and for another display was shot in the arm. With a gun.
This one is just a little too sloppy, not one of the best here. Of course, there is a Bowie fan out there who will bite my head off for putting this one down...it just isn't memorable to me.
03. "Heroes" [11]
And all is well. A truly perfect song, with three different synthesizers chugging and puttering along to create the foggy, train-station like atmosphere, some wonderful lead guitar, and Bowie giving the vocal performance of his career. His voice was recorded from three different microphones, one up close - heard in the first part of the song - the second twenty feet away - added in with the reprise of "I, I will be king" - and the third fifty feet away, heard on the remainder of the song. This is a masterpiece production-wise, and one of the great rock anthems of the 1970's. Never mind its place as the story of lovers meeting at the Berlin Wall, that chorus of "We can be heroes / Just for one day" means something, even today. I'm surprised this song hasn't been given more airtime politically.
My fourth favorite Bowie song, behind "Suffragette City," "1984," and "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps.)"
04. Sons Of The Silent Age [8.5]
The dichotomy of this song is a pain in the ass. On the one hand, there's those gorgeous verses, the beautiful harmonies in the chorus...but then there's the cheesy crooning on the chorus, and the anticipated key change that comes right as the song winds down. It pains me to give this one an eight, but it's so lopsided - to my ears - that it should probably actually earn a five were it not for the sheer beauty of the verses. Take note of the drumming, with the sizzling rolls on the hi-hats at the start of the verses, then the sixteen-beat pattern, emphasizing the slow tempo (perfectly) of the song.
Who am I kidding? The chorus is a minor setback for a song that could have been a ten. Extra half-point because I can do this sort of thing.
05. Blackout [9]
I knew the first four tracks of this album by way of, in this order, *gasp* an illegal Internet download, disc three of the Sound + Vision boxed set I picked up for four dollars at a CD store, and the 2002 Best Of Bowie compilation. Until I re-listened to this album for its review, "Blackout" was sort of an afterthought to me, the closer of side A, off in its own dark corner, as the "other" song on the lyrical half.
It's aged better than two of its comrades. With its stomping tempo, the manic vocals and the return of the wild guitar we heard on "Beauty And The Beast" and "Joe The Lion" - with a vengeance - this song sounds like it could go off at any second. But that's the idea.
06. V-2 Schneider [8]
The instrumental half of the album kicks off with this song, with its catchy bass line, marching drums, and a tuneful (and off-beat) sax part. When the drums switch to a standard 8-beat pattern, the off-tempo sax is made apparent to us. The influence of Kraftwerk is at its most obvious on this song, with the "Schneider" of the song's title a tribute to the band's co-founder Florian Schneider. Nice heavy guitar at around 2:40 in the song...but then it's over. It sounds like there should be more, like it's the first movement of an avant-Krautrock modernist piece. Oh, well.
07. Sense Of Doubt [10]
The darkness so obvious throughout Low returns on this song. Bowie biographer David Buckley describes it as "an eerie synth line like a scrap of sound from a silent expressionist-era soundtrack," which is perfect. I can picture this song accompanied by the visuals of The Strange Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, or something by F.W. Murnau. It's gloomy, chilling...and perfect.
As the b-side of the "Beauty And The Beast" single, Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray joked that it "must have been good fun on pub jukeboxes." Funny enough, I've heard a similar quip from my father regarding "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)" as the b-side of "Cold Turkey."
08. Moss Garden [9.5]
Beautifully atmospheric, this song is given an extra swathe of color with the use of a Japanese instrument, the koto. Surrealistically Oriental-esque, this song segues out of "Sense Of Doubt" like a transition in a dream, where suddenly everything is gentle and peaceful. Listen closely for the sustained synthesizer notes, sounding to me like a flowing stream, and the occasional chirping synth-bird. A great song, the influence of Brian Eno at its strongest - it's perfect ambient music, something you could do yoga to - and it eventually segues into the next song, like a brief meditation, and we're back in the gritty reality of the world with track 9...
09. Neuköln [9.5]
Imagine the first few minutes of "Echoes," specifically the piano tinkles from Rick Wright, but with Ian Underwood of The Mothers Of Invention honking away on his sax. That's this song in a nutshell, a neo-noir piece inspired by a street in Berlin. The solo parts from the synth, sax, and guitar all sound so lonely, like they're being played by buskers alone under the blinking neon lights of Berlin...a terrific song.
10. The Secret Life Of Arabia [9]
Though this song has lyrics, and it's got a danceable tempo, it sounds nothing like the material on side A. No maniacal guitar leads from Hell courtesy of Mr. Fripp, no choruses of echoes, phasing, flanges, etc. It's still adorned with a bit of production, though, its lonesome acoustic/percussion intro made to sound like it's being played in the middle of a desert night. Beautiful song, and a great way to close out, though a little too short. Again, though, maybe that's the idea, a way of snapping us out of the trance of side B.
Subtotal: 91.5% A-
Replayability Factor: 2
I have to be in a mood, yes, but I can have side B of the record on in the background at any time. Side A is a bit too wild for dinner music. How schizophrenic do you like your music to be? For me, I don't mind, but each half of the album is like hearing music from Venus and music from Mars.
Consistency Factor: 2
Pursue glam Bowie first, I say, as a way of getting acquainted with his voice. Get Ziggy, get Diamond Dogs...but then get this one and get Low. If possible, get them both at the same time. This album is definitely the leader of the pack in the "out there, to be purchased once you've gotten familiar with his 'classic' works" category.
External Factors: 1
The point is a plus and a minus to the album: the roles of Tony Visconti and Brian Eno. Would these albums have been possible without Eno's arrangements or Visconti's production? There's plenty of places to look in Bowie's discography that suggest that no, they would not have been what they were. He did his best work with a collaborator, one who helped define the sound and keep Bowie close to Earth, whether it's Visconti, Ziggy sidekick Mick Ronson, Eno, Carlos Alomar, or Iggy Pop.
Total: 96.5% A
Whatever.
Anyway, the question of "who/what next" for this blog came up. Two (already?) weeks ago, I had my heart dead-set on doing Re-Ac-Tor (1981) by Neil Young, mainly because I couldn't fathom why the reviews I've read are so damned indifferent towards it. However, I also promised myself to cover all bases before I began re-treading on certain artists. Yes, there will be plenty of Kinks. There will be a good amount of Zappa (85 albums and counting? The guy's been more prolific in death than Tupac!), Beatles, Stones, Neil, Dylan...but then I thought of David Bowie.
Bowie is one of those artists I've always liked, yet I've never been absolutely obsessed with. On this made-up spectrum, he's always struck me as someone with plenty of style...but what about substance? I'd never really thought about it. I realized I'd never given much thought to his lyrics. And even when I did, it was his glam stuff, which is either telling a story - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972) and Diamond Dogs (1974) - rather meaningless, deliberately cut-up lyrics on Aladdin Sane (1973), or someone else's tunes on Pin-Ups (1973).
Then again, I never really went through a David Bowie "phase." I tended to pick his stuff up sporadically. (Kind of like how I've been meaning to pick up Lou Reed's Transformer album for almost seven years.) In 2003, I picked up Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, a year before I'd copied Ziggy Stardust from my local library and put it on a CD-R alongside Electric Warrior by T. Rex, in late 2004 I bought Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980) on a whim along with Black And Blue by The Rolling Stones (ugh.), and in early 2005 I bought Low and "Heroes" together. Near the end of that year I'd come into a bit of extra money and bought eleven CD's, including The Man Who Sold The World (1970), Hunky Dory (1971), Pin-Ups (1973), and Lodger (1979).
Is this normal for you, the reader? Because when I got into The Kinks, I GOT INTO The Kinks. I saved my lunch money, ventured to 13th Floor Music, and did my business about once or twice a month. Same with Zappa: I trudged on, buying all his budget releases (the ones with the "Cheap Thrills" sticker, priced at $11 where most of his stuff was $17) until...I don't really know. I guess fatigue? I got into American punk music in a big way, then Cheap Trick...
Enough of this nostalgic codswallop.
Something had to be the key to his success beyond his ability to project a series of iconic images. There had to be some reason Charles Shaar Murray, a UK music critic whose judgment I trust - a LOT - is as big a Bowie fan as he is Zappa or The Kinks, right?
After kicking around what was little more than a four-year old mental image (image? Let's go with aural footprint...), I did what I should have done: I re-listened to him. Don't get me wrong, I still find Pin-Ups to be laughably bad for the most part, though a really tight EP could have been culled from it. (One song that would make my cut would be his treatment of a Kinks gem called "Where Have All The Good Times Gone?") I still turn seasick green every single time I hear that plasticine close-miked sax on the awful title track from Young Americans (1975). And dear God, don't get me started on that video for "Dancing In The Street."
But then I hear him on a good day, as with this album - the second of two he did in 1977, a year of great albums all across the board unless you were Ringo or Keef - I feel like an idiot for ever doubting his capability of greatness. Is he a god among men? No, that's why I put that little qualifier at the end there. After his "Berlin Trilogy" of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger - some making an extension with Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) - that was pretty much it, until Earthling in 1997, helped in no small part by Trent Reznor and the fifty-eight different remixes of "I'm Afraid Of Americans" he put out.
Of course, every artist has hit the skids. At least once. If they didn't, they either died (you seriously want me to name names? Jimi, Janis, Duane, Buddy, Sid...), broke up (The Beatles), or were able to triumph over their struggle to make a great album (less common, but The Kinks, with the case of the Lola album and its leading single's success saving their career). In his course on The Beatles, at least twice (before the Get Back sessions and before the lawsuit fest that was the break-up of the band) Glenn Gass would joke, "...and after that they all moved to an island somewhere and are still making great music!" Then he would realistically counter that with, "Look, we should be grateful they broke up when they did. It had to happen, and sure, certain things may have sped it up [Apple, Allen Klein, Yoko], but could you imagine The Beatles' disco album?"
He has a point. Neil Young revived his career in the late 1970's with this very notion - "It's better to burn out / Than it is to rust" - but they'd run their course. As a collective, they weren't able to agree on much, except maybe wanting to lynch Paul. Other than their immediate solo releases, I don't feel any of them recaptured their former glory (and even then, I have to say All Things Must Pass is a rockist's Viagra, bloated, overproduced, and what was up with the third disc?). Bowie has gone in and out of vogue a few times. Given his later start, and his intermittent hiatuses from recording (it's been six years since his last album, Reality), he doesn't quite have the borderline unapproachable juggernaut discography of Neil, Dylan, or Zappa.
Yet he's just as legendary, and rightfully so. He's rock and roll's great chameleon, visually and stylistically. Sure, Zappa bounced around rock, jazz, and classical like it was a game of Pong, and Dylan's gone through more phases than the Soviet government, but Bowie kept it accessible, appealing, and endlessly fascinating. Glam Bowie, for me, is hit and miss. I love side B of Ziggy Stardust plus "Starman" and "Five Years," but Aladdin Sane doesn't do too much for me. At all. Pin-Ups is a very bumpy covers album. His "I Can't Explain" is brittle and slow, his vocals on "Friday On My Mind" waif-like, but his version of "See Emily Play" thumps along with the kind of swagger the rest of the album tries for, but fails.
It's not a requirement, but I really do feel one has to approach glam with - there's no way to say this politely - part of their brain shut off. What I mean is that it's fun, campy, often funny...but don't expect Dylanesque portraits, Daviesian commentary, or Zappaesque humor. It's fun to listen to and play along with, but the real draw, as for its cultural relevance, was the outright willingness to do a piss-take on gender roles. Mick Jagger was, at one point in time, considered macho - this was before the studded velour jumpsuit he donned on their 1973 tour - and guys like Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Rod Stewart, and on down the line were the beautiful faces of the men of rock and roll.
Then came this weirdo with a permanently dilated pupil, a shocking red mullet, no eyebrows, and...he - or she? - is kinda cute. Or handsome. Cute? This mysterious person is wearing makeup...
Alice Cooper wore makeup, too, but he went for the schlock horror look after a glam image for his first three albums (none of which garnered attention commercially, though they are pretty good). Even then, there's no doubt - in spite of the name - that Alice Cooper was a dude. Pretty manly-looking fellow.
But this scrawny little humanoid with the makeup and the mullet? And what's this business of singing about being an alien? Is he/she/it an alien?
I don't mean to belabor the point. You get it, I hope. It was all Bowie's concoction, that it would garner a bunch of interest if he donned this mysterious persona and said he was gay at a time where it really was shocking, in spite of what the religious right may suggest these days. But it was an artistic phase. He grew out of it, with the terrific Diamond Dogs (1974) marking the midpoint in his shift from glam-rock to soul/funk. This marked what's called his Thin White Duke phase.
Though I can say I hate what I've heard off Young Americans, which gave him a hit with "Fame," a song co-written with John Lennon (and as far as I'm concerned, the only reason it got attention), I did enjoy Station To Station (1976). The soul (technically blue-eyed Philly soul, merging two of my least-favorite musical sounds together) of Young Americans was *sniff* heavily dusted with *sniff* some sort of *rubs nose frantically* magic white powder, giving *nose begins to bleed* a mysterious, darker, avant-garde edge to the music. It was actually the influence of German acts like Kraftwerk, NEU!, Can, and Faust, though I'm sure doings lines of Bolivian marching powder helped to bolster the almost sterile - in a good way, not a Dark Side Of The Moon way - sound of Station To Station.
Living off of cocaine and red peppers - and little else - Bowie got skinny, moody, and super paranoid. Convinced occultists wanted to perform rituals on his excrement, he collected his piss in mason jars, which he stored in the refrigerator. He famously declared England should have a dictator. He rather infamously got his picture taken while standing in the backseat of a Mercedes giving a Hitler salute outside Victoria Station.
Not the best time in his personal life. He may have had his big United States breakthrough (commercially, though he had his Stateside admirers since Ziggy), but if he'd kept it up he would have gone the way of so many.
It came to a head one day, when as he delicately put it in a not-at-all-disgusting way, "I went to blow my nose and half me brains came out." He, musician pal Brian Eno (ex-Roxy Music), and producer Tony Visconti (who deserves to be in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, but no, we'd rather lobby for Brian Epstein coaxing The Beatles into Pierre Cardin suits) went to Europe to record the three albums now called his "Berlin Trilogy," consisting of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger. I consider these to be Bowie at his best and his most experimental (anytime you've got Brian Eno on board, it will be so-and-so at their most experimental, and that's a great thing). One of the truly great trilogies of rock and roll, right up there with electric Dylan, Neil's trip to the ditch, The Kinks' "British" albums from the late 1960's, you name it.
Though the introspective therapy would come with Scary Monsters, the album after Lodger, Bowie is certainly shaking the specter of drugs off his back. Parts of Low and all of "Heroes" were recorded at Hansa Studio in Berlin, which just happens to be adjacent to the Berlin Wall. The tension of the location - and the politics of the region - seemed to manifest itself in the music. Side A of Low consists (almost) entirely of lyrical pieces, all relatively short...and side B is four of the gloomiest instrumentals I'd heard until I discovered there was an entire genre based off of this sound. (Meaning, naturally, in the 30 years since then there's only been gloomier, creepier sounding shit, and it's brilliant - I recommend Veil Of Secrecy for some great, dark ambient music.)
"Heroes" isn't unlike Low, though the differences are obvious. Both still have the same lyrical/instrumental divide, though the second album closes with a lyrical track (while the first album begins with an instrumental). It may be less dark - though "Sense Of Doubt" shows it wasn't all flushed out of the system - but I think it's the artier of the pair. The musical palate is broad, especially on side B. Given everything else that came out in 1977, including this album's older brother Low, it was pretty bold for the New Musical Express to give this record "Album Of The Year."
Do I agree with that honor? Eh...not quite, but it's pretty stiff competition with Cheap Trick's first (and best) album, the rise of UK punk, debuts from Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads, oh, yeah, and The Kinks returning from Preservation land and putting out their first non-conceptual or thematic or operatic album in (literally) a decade. (Sure, they're my favorite band, but I won't deny their occasional inaccessibility! See also: Zappa, Frank.)
These albums showed Bowie was more than just an image. There was always a bit of substance beneath that style, he just seemed too busy reinterpreting the Christ myth on Ziggy Stardust, Orwell on Diamond Dogs, or using a lyrical technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs on Aladdin Sane. There's plenty of references to the Bible and the Occult on Station To Station, but here on the Berlin albums it's obvious for everyone to see.
The weirdo with the dilated pupil shed all exterior personae and gave us the weirdo with the dilated pupil, the artist. I can forget about his crap-tastic duet with Mick Jagger on "Dancing In The Street." I can forgive him for Labyrinth. At his best, he's more than just a performer. He's a composer, the writer of one of the greatest rock anthems ever, and - after a closer examination - a terrific poet.
Style over substance, my shiny metal ass.
01. Beauty And The Beast [10]
An excellent opening track, with a tense build-up of an intro. The resulting release of tension doesn't lose a drop of momentum. Its lyrics, about Bowie's split personality as a result of his drug use, are matched by the savagery of Robert Fripp's scorching guitar leads. The robotic drums do fills only when absolutely necessary...an amazing track.
02. Joe The Lion [7]
I like the dueling lead guitar parts throughout the song...but it's only listenable on headphones. Otherwise it sounds like you're listening to two songs at the same time. Musically, I would say this song meanders a little too much. Very danceable beat, but what's with the spoken intro in the middle? The lyrics are apparently about Chris Burden - hence the "nail me to a car" line - the performance artist who was nailed to a Volkswagen in 1971 and for another display was shot in the arm. With a gun.
This one is just a little too sloppy, not one of the best here. Of course, there is a Bowie fan out there who will bite my head off for putting this one down...it just isn't memorable to me.
03. "Heroes" [11]
And all is well. A truly perfect song, with three different synthesizers chugging and puttering along to create the foggy, train-station like atmosphere, some wonderful lead guitar, and Bowie giving the vocal performance of his career. His voice was recorded from three different microphones, one up close - heard in the first part of the song - the second twenty feet away - added in with the reprise of "I, I will be king" - and the third fifty feet away, heard on the remainder of the song. This is a masterpiece production-wise, and one of the great rock anthems of the 1970's. Never mind its place as the story of lovers meeting at the Berlin Wall, that chorus of "We can be heroes / Just for one day" means something, even today. I'm surprised this song hasn't been given more airtime politically.
My fourth favorite Bowie song, behind "Suffragette City," "1984," and "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps.)"
04. Sons Of The Silent Age [8.5]
The dichotomy of this song is a pain in the ass. On the one hand, there's those gorgeous verses, the beautiful harmonies in the chorus...but then there's the cheesy crooning on the chorus, and the anticipated key change that comes right as the song winds down. It pains me to give this one an eight, but it's so lopsided - to my ears - that it should probably actually earn a five were it not for the sheer beauty of the verses. Take note of the drumming, with the sizzling rolls on the hi-hats at the start of the verses, then the sixteen-beat pattern, emphasizing the slow tempo (perfectly) of the song.
Who am I kidding? The chorus is a minor setback for a song that could have been a ten. Extra half-point because I can do this sort of thing.
05. Blackout [9]
I knew the first four tracks of this album by way of, in this order, *gasp* an illegal Internet download, disc three of the Sound + Vision boxed set I picked up for four dollars at a CD store, and the 2002 Best Of Bowie compilation. Until I re-listened to this album for its review, "Blackout" was sort of an afterthought to me, the closer of side A, off in its own dark corner, as the "other" song on the lyrical half.
It's aged better than two of its comrades. With its stomping tempo, the manic vocals and the return of the wild guitar we heard on "Beauty And The Beast" and "Joe The Lion" - with a vengeance - this song sounds like it could go off at any second. But that's the idea.
06. V-2 Schneider [8]
The instrumental half of the album kicks off with this song, with its catchy bass line, marching drums, and a tuneful (and off-beat) sax part. When the drums switch to a standard 8-beat pattern, the off-tempo sax is made apparent to us. The influence of Kraftwerk is at its most obvious on this song, with the "Schneider" of the song's title a tribute to the band's co-founder Florian Schneider. Nice heavy guitar at around 2:40 in the song...but then it's over. It sounds like there should be more, like it's the first movement of an avant-Krautrock modernist piece. Oh, well.
07. Sense Of Doubt [10]
The darkness so obvious throughout Low returns on this song. Bowie biographer David Buckley describes it as "an eerie synth line like a scrap of sound from a silent expressionist-era soundtrack," which is perfect. I can picture this song accompanied by the visuals of The Strange Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, or something by F.W. Murnau. It's gloomy, chilling...and perfect.
As the b-side of the "Beauty And The Beast" single, Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray joked that it "must have been good fun on pub jukeboxes." Funny enough, I've heard a similar quip from my father regarding "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)" as the b-side of "Cold Turkey."
08. Moss Garden [9.5]
Beautifully atmospheric, this song is given an extra swathe of color with the use of a Japanese instrument, the koto. Surrealistically Oriental-esque, this song segues out of "Sense Of Doubt" like a transition in a dream, where suddenly everything is gentle and peaceful. Listen closely for the sustained synthesizer notes, sounding to me like a flowing stream, and the occasional chirping synth-bird. A great song, the influence of Brian Eno at its strongest - it's perfect ambient music, something you could do yoga to - and it eventually segues into the next song, like a brief meditation, and we're back in the gritty reality of the world with track 9...
09. Neuköln [9.5]
Imagine the first few minutes of "Echoes," specifically the piano tinkles from Rick Wright, but with Ian Underwood of The Mothers Of Invention honking away on his sax. That's this song in a nutshell, a neo-noir piece inspired by a street in Berlin. The solo parts from the synth, sax, and guitar all sound so lonely, like they're being played by buskers alone under the blinking neon lights of Berlin...a terrific song.
10. The Secret Life Of Arabia [9]
Though this song has lyrics, and it's got a danceable tempo, it sounds nothing like the material on side A. No maniacal guitar leads from Hell courtesy of Mr. Fripp, no choruses of echoes, phasing, flanges, etc. It's still adorned with a bit of production, though, its lonesome acoustic/percussion intro made to sound like it's being played in the middle of a desert night. Beautiful song, and a great way to close out, though a little too short. Again, though, maybe that's the idea, a way of snapping us out of the trance of side B.
Subtotal: 91.5% A-
Replayability Factor: 2
I have to be in a mood, yes, but I can have side B of the record on in the background at any time. Side A is a bit too wild for dinner music. How schizophrenic do you like your music to be? For me, I don't mind, but each half of the album is like hearing music from Venus and music from Mars.
Consistency Factor: 2
Pursue glam Bowie first, I say, as a way of getting acquainted with his voice. Get Ziggy, get Diamond Dogs...but then get this one and get Low. If possible, get them both at the same time. This album is definitely the leader of the pack in the "out there, to be purchased once you've gotten familiar with his 'classic' works" category.
External Factors: 1
The point is a plus and a minus to the album: the roles of Tony Visconti and Brian Eno. Would these albums have been possible without Eno's arrangements or Visconti's production? There's plenty of places to look in Bowie's discography that suggest that no, they would not have been what they were. He did his best work with a collaborator, one who helped define the sound and keep Bowie close to Earth, whether it's Visconti, Ziggy sidekick Mick Ronson, Eno, Carlos Alomar, or Iggy Pop.
Total: 96.5% A
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Absence
I was at my parents' place - a little longer than I'd hoped - and was stuck with a computer from 2001 that won't install Flash updates, won't install Microsoft Office 2007, won't burn CD's (though it used to), and just plain sucks.
So I didn't have a chance to throw together a multimedia extravaganza in the nine days I was in my hometown.
Anyway, I'll be back on tonight with something new. Honest.
Alex
PS - I was a little shocked to see Re-Ac-Tor not get any votes. Oh, well, the people have spoken. By a narrow, narrow margin.
So I didn't have a chance to throw together a multimedia extravaganza in the nine days I was in my hometown.
Anyway, I'll be back on tonight with something new. Honest.
Alex
PS - I was a little shocked to see Re-Ac-Tor not get any votes. Oh, well, the people have spoken. By a narrow, narrow margin.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Who - A Quick One (1966)
I feel bad for thirteen days of no reviews. It's been a bit hectic for me finding an apartment in a new town, enjoying some time with my better half before her own apartment hunt, and (to some extent) coping with the fact that I apparently now have a solid reader base, beyond m@ (my part-time mentor from my hometown) and my cheerleading fiance. Why, people might outwardly disagree with something I say!
It sounds stupid, I'm sure of it: man writes blog, people read blog, man panics. The fact is that I write for my own enjoyment, to sort out how I appreciate music, to critically assess what I love and give a re-examination to artists I've placed on a high pedestal in my youth to see how they've stood up in the time that has passed. Beyond that, I also don't think anything I write is all that good.
Of course, I've said the exact same things about an essay on the Bohumil Hrabal novel Closely Watched Trains and its filmic interpretation that my Czech professor insisted be submitted to an international writing contest sponsored by the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences. I've said the exact same thing about my mini-thesis on The Kinks. I definitely think my feeble attempts at fiction are just that: feeble attempts.
And I will say the same thing about my Master's thesis, whatever it may be. I'm leaning towards Zappa, my father is practically begging me to write about Les Paul (a bit unfair for me, as I am currently not a guitar player - I quip that my being a drummer "barely qualifies me as a musician"), while I myself am thinking Zappa's cultural relations might be too easy, yet at the same time a musicological breakdown of his work is...labyrinthine. That's being polite about it. Maybe the answer rests elsewhere. Oh, well, who gives a fart, I'm breaking my own cardinal rule about not getting autobiographical. I felt I needed to explain my absence.
One quick final thing: I will also admit I am my own harshest critic, and while I reserve the option to not publish a comment on this site I find rude or unflattering*, I didn't have to. Either you guys are starved for decent album reviews or I really do have some skills to speak of as a writer. I would like to thank all of you for leaving comments. It was very touching - thanks to Dave Emlen and his fabulous dedication to The Kinks - and I realized that Kinks fans come in all shapes, sizes, and tastes, but we're all united under the umbrella of Ray Davies' genius. I wish I could say the same for Zappa fans...everyone from leftists like me to classicists to guitar hero rockists to cynical Ron Paul libertarian assholes want to claim him for their own. His widow isn't helping things at all, unless of course dividing the fan base even more sharply than before is considered helpful in some esoteric circle of which I am not aware.
The Hell with it, let's get this started before I lay down on the couch while you read on in an overstuffed leather chair.
I've got lots of issues with The Who, almost to the same extent as The Rolling Stones, though not as dramatically. With The Rolling Stones, I feel like they barely achieved their potential to do great things in their time. That slew of albums from Aftermath to Goat's Head Soup (yes, I'm a Stones fan who loves that album, one of those...) is a great run. I think Some Girls was excellent, though those two interim albums are God-awful. Their longevity is to their detriment. Anthony DeCurtis, citing Glenn Gass in a documentary on Bob Dylan (I know this because Glenn proudly showed this in the Dylan class, saying, "How cool is this! I'm the guy Anthony DeCurtis is talking about! I'm quotable!") said something to the effect that his pre-Love And Theft albums were so not up to par that the quality of his earlier works can begin to come into question.
I love The Rolling Stones when they're at their peak. Unfortunately, this is only a slice of a very inconsistent cake. This is the same band that did Dirty Work. Every album since then is praised upon release as "their best since Some Girls" or, in more daring circles, "their best since Exile On Main Street." Then a couple years go by and we all realize we were just creaming our collective jeans because The Rolling Stones once again set out and proved to us that they're not dead yet, with a leading single that is some rewrite of "Brown Sugar" to make it certain.
With time marching forward, as it tends to do, The Who are digging a similar grave. A lot of people checked out when they lost Keith Moon in 1978. And yet enough time has passed that there are people out their who are completely fine with Face Dances and It's Hard and appreciate them for what they are. Kind of like the rare Three Stooges fan who defends Shemp Howard and in some rare cases prefers him over Curly. And that's fine...but then John Entwistle died the night before the start of their tour, and they carried on.
I won't judge that decision, for Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend to carry on and even release an album in 2006, Endless Wire. Just don't call yourselves The Who!
Going back to the Three Stooges, The Who were sort of a comedy troupe, The Four Stooges of rock and roll. Sure, The Beatles had charm and those cute Liverpudlian accents, The Monkees were cuddly and safe for prepubescent consumption, and The Rolling Stones were ruffians with their defiant nature...but these guys were true hooligans in the sense of fun, contained destruction. (They didn't burn churches, for example.)
Please, do yourself a favor and watch The Kids Are Alright. I'll do my best to describe the band, but the film does it better. These four distinct personalities meshed so badly together that it worked. They were notorious for not getting along, at least back in the day. In present time, Roger and Pete probably lean on each other like Siamese twins. Pete was the serious singer/songwriter of the group, seeking spiritual enlightenment, a mix of the best of Ray Davies and George Harrison. Roger Daltrey was the street smart, pretty face of the group (I don't ever think he was a particularly good-looking man myself) and not a bad singer when he wasn't overdoing it, looking just as likely a dockworker as he was a rock singer. John Entwistle was the token dark, quiet one of the band...yet also the one with the sharpest, driest wit. A snappy dresser, the proverbial anchor as both the bassist and the only one not keen on destroying his gear on stage. (In the hotel rooms, he was just as bad as the next guy. Literally, the next guy I'll be discussing!)
And then there was Keith Moon, the reason I wanted to be a drummer. He was all the great comedic madmen combined, as destructive as Curly Howard, lovable as Harpo Marx, angst-ridden and apt to play dress up as Peter Sellers...and yet also a great drummer. Don't expect him to ever play a straight rhythm & blues-friendly pocket beat, no way...he seemed in perpetual motion, all over his drum kit, and yet with the layout of the band, with a bass pretty much playing lead and the guitar providing rhythm, it worked. I read somewhere his drumming was much like a keyboard arrangement. A bit of a stretch, maybe, but I can say he was able to take what could have been a chorus of chaos on his drum kit and make it work into being both elegant and perfectly rhythmic.
Before the band's invention of bawdy arena rock on Who's Next, before that terrible bucket of overindulgent rectal mucous that is Ken Russell's film version of Tommy, before the countless farewell tours that boast to be the last time - FOR REAL THIS TIME! - only to be disproven a year or so later, before "Eminence Front," before "You Better, You Bet," before Rock Band made them known to an array of 13 year olds who can afford a gaming console but can't afford a low-end guitar so they can play for real, and before CSI cannibalized not just one but three of their songs into cut-and-paste "we're using this for no real reason" theme songs...
...before all that, there was The Who, four guys from Shepherd's Bush in Northern London, who loved R&B and soul, but were terrible at it, their saving grace being one of the great defiant anthems of their time, let alone all time, "My Generation." I'm quite harsh on their first album, in the same way I was with Please Please Me. There's some great songs, precursors to punk (Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols and Mick Jones of The Clash - no relation - have both said that early Who was the music they learned guitar to) like "Out In The Street" and "The Good's Gone." Even when they're whimsical, as on "It's Not True," the song is quite solid musically and on a lyrical level funny.
When the time came for their second album, it was decided that in order to make more money off of their new LP, they would all write at least two songs a piece. Roger wound up doing one, John and Keith each turned in two, and Pete did the rest except for their cover of "Heatwave" by Martha & The Vandellas. The results are surprisingly creative, though there was no doubt some sort of pressure due to the changing current of pop music.
Between Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Rubber Soul in 1965, the bar was raised for the British bands. I'll go ahead and throw The Beach Boys into this mix as well, because alongside Dylan, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye they were the only true innovating artists in America (though much respect goes out to the men behind the consoles, the Phil Spectors and Berry Gordys and Jim Stewarts who took American pop music beyond the realm of Fabian) at that time, though I don't think Gaye and Robinson saw The Beatles as "competition." The scenes on the West Coast were just opening up, because of this fusion of The Beatles and Dylan.
It was up to The Beatles' fellow countrymen (plus The Beach Boys) to keep up with the ante raised by those three albums. A standard was established, and whether or not you could overcome that hurdle was a litmus test. Are you willing to go out of your comfort zone? The Rolling Stones did it with Aftermath, an album of all-original tunes without a single cover to be found. Taking more of a cue from Dylan, Ray Davies did "A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion," and "Sunny Afternoon" before ending 1966 with the one-two punch of Face To Face and "Dead End Street," firmly establishing The Kinks as an individual, trend-bucking ensemble. (Right in time for them to get banned from the United States, but them's the breaks.) The Beach Boys did Pet Sounds, which is a producer's album through and through.
Other British groups thankfully (Herman's Hermits) and regrettably (The Yardbirds, Them, The Animals) didn't quite make it. As much as I love the Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds, producer Mickie Most took them out of their sonically experimental territory heard on Roger The Engineer and into psychedelic pop. With The Animals is was a combination of their lack of a strong central songwriter (though that was the case with Them and The Yardbirds as well) and the fact that half the band drank too much and the other half smoked too much, and I'm not talking about ciggies.
Though they were late bloomers, in this weird turf between The Kinks' emergence and latter-day British Invasion acts like The Creation, The Pretty Things, and The Small Faces, The Who responded to this radical shift with flying colors. I don't rank A Quick One as one of the all-time greats, there were still some kinks (sorry!) to be worked out, but when they were on you'd better buckle the Hell up. What weighed their first album down so badly was their attempts at James Brown numbers. They're so bad...well, they're not quite good (though my father ranks The Who Sing My Generation as one of the funniest albums ever, alongside Elvis Presley's Christmas record). They're pretty crummy, actually.
It was "My Generation" that put them on the map, and their follow-up single, "Substitute," carried on this message of angst and a surprisingly honest message of "I look pretty tall / But my heels are high." The song isn't the same aural assault that "My Generation" was, but just as strong in every respect. Producer Shel Talmy**, apparently in an act of spite over the release of the self-produced "Substitute," put out the song "A Legal Matter" as a single. A step backwards in the short-term, yes...but thank God history has ignored this slight blunder.
Their next single was "I'm A Boy," a beautifully arranged and funny story of a song. It was part of a larger sequence of songs Pete had in mind, to be called "Quads." I can't find much else on it, other than that they would be thematically related songs. A couple has quadruplets, expecting four little girls...but they get three girls and a boy, who they subsequently raise as though he were a girl. Groundbreaking for its time, still a bit shocking today (maybe more since everyone seems to be too politically correct for their own good), "I'm A Boy" was another step further in showing the band had morphed beyond their Mod origins, venturing into pop art, albeit musically, in the same way that I consider The Residents to be the musical embodiment of Dada.
A few stray singles from their first album, "The Kids Are Alright" (another excellent tune) and "La-La-La Lies" (eh...not so good) and the EP Ready, Steady, Who! were floated out to keep the band in the public eye.
Then came "Happy Jack." It was a #3 hit in the UK, but more importantly it got The Who into the US charts, peaking at #24. It's a great song to hear, even today...it sounds like it's on the verge of exploding during the verses, and when the chorus comes along the band takes the idea of tension-and-release to the maximum. The word "assault" keeps coming up in these descriptions. I know in this day and age of death metal, speed metal, hardcore punk, etc., "Happy Jack" and its chorus probably sounds like a walk in the park when compared to Napalm Death or Minor Threat. Once again, just put it in the context of 1966. No record bounced along the way it did, not even "Paperback Writer."
"Happy Jack" was recorded after A Quick One, but released before it as a single. A Quick One has a spirit to it, of a band with a newfound sense of freedom, the eccentric (but eager to push the envelope) Kit Lambert behind the console, and ready to pull out the stops and establish themselves as their own band. It took The Kinks' string of sardonic folk-rock singles and Face To Face to show their chops beyond the (delightfully sublime) proto-metal of "You Really Got Me." In a very similar manner, A Quick One was The Who's first proper album in their own realm without relying on cover tunes or trying to emulate someone else's sound or style.
And away we go. Buckle your seatbelts...at least for side A.
01. Run, Run, Run [10]
As far as album openers go, and there are many, many great ones out there, this is like the running of the bulls captured by a four-piece band. They pound this one out like their lives depend on it. Lyrically, it's quite an inversion of the somewhat scornful take on women in "The Good's Gone," "A Legal Matter," and "It's Not True." On those three tunes from their first album, the girl in question is the source of strife, in the latter examples attempting to ruin the narrator's life. Mean, moody, and magnificent. But on "Run, Run, Run," the song's subject is an object of sympathy, a hapless chick encountering nothing but horrible luck and encountering symbols of foreboding superstition.
Beyond the whimsical lyrics, sung with the same brooding voice of "The Good's Gone," the song is a musical bombardment. Keith is pounding out four beats a measure on the snare, bass, and his cymbals, Pete and John do their things quite aptly - I love the way John brings the band back into the final verse with those solid triplets out of the solo - and Roger's double-tracked lead sounds like two equally strong performances, of which they could not pick a favorite, at least to my ears. Great song, and proof that The Who were a Hell of a hard rock band...a good three years before Led Zeppelin.
For shits and giggles, and further proof that I love the Internet, here's the song in mono. Being a slightly different mix, keep your ears open for some feedback around 1:45 in the song.
02. Boris The Spider [10]
One of John's two songs, this one being his songwriting debut on a Who album (his "In The City" was the b-side to "I'm A Boy"). He hits the ground running with a Who classic, though not a single, greeted by fans like an old friend at concerts. During the verses, John demonstrates what a strong singing voice he has, before the un-human basso chorus and the falsetto "creeeeepy, craaaaawlie" bridge show off what a dynamic set of pipes he has. Again, there's a sense of lyrical humor in this song, with the music's heaviness throwing things off-kilter in a good way, in that the song's hero sees a spider and kills it with a book. That's it, but it's turned into a 2:30 pop song. Terrific!
03. I Need You [10]
Here's something you don't see often: a drummer writing a song. Not only that, but a Hell of a good song with a good melody and a rollicking performance to boot. The song's original title was "I Need You (Like I Need A Hole In The Head)." Lyrically, it's a bit choppy. I'm led to understand it was a bit of a snap at The Beatles, as Mr. Moon felt that they talked behind his back in a code - I should probably mention that the members of the band at this point were probably still popping amphetamines which can induce paranoia, make you a better musician, and lead to the creation of Blonde On Blonde - and the voice at 1:12 is Keith doing his imitation of John Lennon.
This song also features my favorite presentation of the drums on any song recorded, ever, on those choruses, where the cymbals almost wash out the entire rest of the band. It kind of sounds like that when you're playing with a band, so I won't deny its accuracy, never mind the resulting effect just sounds cool. By the way, that's Keith on lead vocal, not Pete, though I can see how one could get the two confused.
04. Whiskey Man [11]
My favorite song on the album, by far, which is saying plenty given the last three songs. John sings lead again as he did on "Boris The Spider" (sounding an awful lot like Roger), turning in another great performance. There's also a French horn solo, played by Mr. Entwistle. And it's perfect. The song is about an alcoholic who is joined by the "whiskey man" whenever he drinks. As we learn, it's a figment of his imagination, induced by the alcoholism. With the final reprise of the song's opening lines, John sings it like a looney rocking back and forth in his "little padded cell," reminding himself why he's there in the first place. Woefully overlooked, I feel, in favor of its arachnid cousin track, this is the better of the two, and one of The Who's finest moments as a band.
05. Heatwave [5.5]
This is where it stops being iconic. To its merit, the song is driven by the bass. After ripping it up on the first four tracks, this one totters along rather clumsily. The original by Martha & The Vandellas was catchy, at a stomping, clap-along tempo. But here, it seems like it doesn't quite pick up momentum, I feel at the wrong tempo, but at the same time it sounds like an outtake for what could have been a really good Motown cover (see their amazing version of "Dancing In The Street," also by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, from The Who BBC Sessions and you'll know what I'm talking about). A good touch of wasted potential, I'm afraid.
To make matters worse/better (depending on who you ask), the American release of this album removed this song in favor of their latest single, "Happy Jack," which also became the title of the LP. For once, the US version of the album is in fact BETTER. God, I cringe saying that...but it's true.
06. Cobwebs And Strange [10]
Thankfully, "Heatwave" is a mere 117 awkward, unsure seconds long, meaning we aren't in the "they could have done better" territory for an extended period. This is Keith's other song, and, um...it's out there. For any other band, this would arguably be about as weird as they got. But over the next few years, Keith contributed some real oddities as single b-sides ("Dogs Part Two," "Waspman") that are at least just as odd and unique as this one.
It's a march, it's a series of bitchin' drum solos...and that's it, but it's maniacal good fun. Hopefully you're watching the video attached for this song. It's the promo film for "Call Me Lightning" intercut with footage and photographs depicting Keith's wild side, from The Kids Are Alright. He may have only lived 31 years, but it seems he had a lot of fun. A lot. However much of it he remembered at the end of the day is highly speculative.
07. Don't Look Away [9]
The band opens the second half of the record with one of Pete's. "Run, Run, Run" this is not, but it shows Pete had as much capability to write a Beatlesque pop song (I can picture McCartney singing this on Help! or Rubber Soul, right down to the slightly countrified solo that could have come out of George's Gretsch hollowbody, the one he had on The Ed Sullivan Show) as he could do an anthemic "WHY DON'T YOU ALL F-F-F-FADE AWAY" declaration of independence set to a no-holds-barred musical backdrop. I'm docking a point for this one being maybe a hair too derivative, but a 9 is still a good score. Like Aftermath, I used to piss on side B of this record with contempt, if only because these songs didn't have the hyperbolic dynamics of, say, "Run, Run, Run" or "Cobwebs And Strange." Now in my advanced age of 22 (having first consciously heard this album at age three, later buying the CD at age 12), I am once again eating my words. Pass the ketchup, please.
08. See My Way [4]
On second thought, hold the ketchup. This song is pretty dull. The liner notes for BBC Sessions described this as being fairly tentative compared to the version they did for Auntie Beeb (which I can't find on the YouTube, proving once again why I hate the Internet). This just sounds unfinished, again, like they could have done a significantly better take. Whatever instrument that is playing the solo (sort of a weird organ or a flute-voiced organ?) sounds stupid to me. John's bassline saves this song from being a lo-fi heap of parrot droppings, to crib a Python quote.
Did I mention this song was written by Roger?
09. So Sad About Us [10]
Mod-rock's last stand, at least until British punk shook hands with New Wave and gave us The Jam, The Buzzcocks, et al. This is a great song, and its cover by The Jam (and others) has given this song a legacy as a shimmering example of Mod rock, the first Britpop song for my money. (So they didn't just invent punk music!) A step up from "Don't Look Away" in all the right ways, a pop song unique to Mr. Townshend's pen, very much in the vein of The Who's own style and sound. One of hundreds of semi-obscure album tracks (like "Picture Book" by The Kinks, "Not A Second Time" by The Beatles, or "Take It Or Leave It" by The Rolling Stones) out there that would/should/could have been smash singles in a perfect world, had they been released as such. It's also one of the best breakup songs of all time, period.
Here's a clip of them doing it live, which I'd never seen before. It's always neat to see these once-rare clips that were unavailable when Jeff Stein was assembling The Kids Are Alright.
10. A Quick One, While He's Away [8.5]
I've been spoiled on this song. Its vastly superior live rendition from The Rolling Stones' unreleased-until-1996 Rock & Roll Circus TV special, featured in The Kids Are Alright, is as far as I'm concerned the greatest real-time performance ever captured, and The Who's best moment as a band pre-Tommy. It is also a tour de force^ if you're a drummer.
But this version? Let me play like the politicians do and dodge that question. The story behind its inception is that the band had about ten minutes to fill on the record. Kit Lambert suggested to Pete that he do a ten-minute song. He initially balked, saying a ten minute song was unheard of, and that "British pop songs are two minute fifty, by tradition!" as Pete explained to Melvyn Bragg in 1974. The agreement struck was that Pete write a ten-minute story, with each segment of the story being a song in its own right.
Here's the breakdown of it:
[0:00-1:59] Her Man's Been Gone / Crying Town, then after a really bad edit...
[2:00-3:31] We Have A Remedy
[3:32-5:13] Ivor The Engine Driver
[5:14-6:40] Soon Be Home
[6:40-9:10] You Are Forgiven
It isn't as bad as I remembered, listening to it again, once I get the blistering stage treatment out of my head...pretending it doesn't exist. What sounds like white noise during "Ivor The Engine Driver" is in fact the crash cymbals sped up and compressed, to emulate a train engine. It doesn't work out as such, but still creates an interesting effect. The performance on the whole is a bit rough-shod, though the production on "We Have A Remedy" and "You Are Forgiven" is phenomenally done. Its polish makes it obvious the band had heard Pet Sounds.
This blows "Going Home" out of the water, that's for sure; the boys here don't seem keen on wasting your time. It's an interestingly done recording, I'd love to hear the early takes of it. Even though it sounds brittle in parts, the melodies throughout are exceptional. For this to have just been from one songwriter's pen is the telltale sign of Mr. Townshend's genius. There are bits I'm not crazy about: the vocal interlude between "We Have A Remedy" and "Ivor The Engine Driver," with the heavy echoes, sounds thin...I don't like it. It sticks out to me for some reason.
For what it is, a pressing of the boundaries for what pop music could/should be, in this case an extended story made up of several short songs, this is a successful experiment. If only more progressive rock acts had followed suit instead of pursuing the pompous classically-oriented avenues that abound with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Yes...ugh...
For this tune, which I once hated (for real!), I'm giving The Who an A+ for effort, B- for the final product, averaging out for the score it's earned. Pete would return to the idea of a larger work of music telling stories or at least featuring a concept, but I'll save those for later.
Subtotal: 88% B+
Replayability Factor: 1
I can hear side A anytime, anyplace, anywhere. Side B, which I do enjoy aside from "See My Way," is pretty good...but there's too many nuances in "A Quick One, While He's Away" that dictate careful listening. Careful listening, as in, headphones are almost mandatory to enjoy it all.
Consistency Factor: 1
For them, this was groundbreaking. I can't emphasize enough that they really came into their own with this album. The final track was the first venture into conceptual work, which Pete would actively pursue for the next seven years on the band's albums. Much of their "classic" career is given its grounding here. However, the format of Pete having all of four (!) of the album's ten songs is unheard of elsewhere. On all future albums, there's a song or three by John (at the least, zero on Quadrophenia, at most three on Who Are You and It's Hard) and aside from "Tommy's Holiday Camp," credited to Keith (but written by Pete, who gave Keith credit for the idea of a holiday camp) and a few rare cover tunes, THAT'S IT. This was Pete's game, much like Ray Davies' role as the dominant songwriter in The Kinks, with the occasional contribution from brother Dave. It's a great album, this one, but hardly representative of The Who and each member's roles within the band.
External Factors: 2
Inventing punk music wasn't good enough for them, so they had to go and invent progressive rock with "A Quick One, While He's Away," with its segments and tempo changes, which they in turn streamlined into an amazing live workout. Beyond that, nowhere else can you hear the band working collectively and creatively. As I said above under "Consistency Factor," this is the only album where you'll hear songs by Keith Moon. Or Roger, though in this case I say that's fine with me. 1966 was the year the rest of the hip world responded to electric Dylan and the matured Beatles, and though they were still freshmen in the grand scheme of the British Invasion, they passed the test.
TOTAL: 92% A-
Singles:
(There's a LOT, so get comfy!)
01. Substitute [10]
Iconic Who, a more honest approach of examining youth culture by way of identity crises and putting on fronts. It is nowhere near as madhouse as "My Generation," with its acoustic guitar riff, but John and Keith cover the sonic low end of the song quite well. At this stage, Roger sounds like he's still singing a bit higher than he should, but given the lyrical themes of insecurity throughout this song it works. A great single by a band on their way to greater things.
02. Circles [9]
Make no bones about it, The Who's single discography is a confusing mess of only-available-on-rarities-compilations-from-the-1980's, a song being the b-side in the UK but not in the US, only to be put out as a US b-side the following year (but in a different mix) - it is infinitely frustrating.
Take this song, for instance. This version is entitled "Circles," though it was erroneously labeled "Instant Party" on some other issues. THEN, they re-record the song (see below), entitle it "Instant Party," and it's the next single's b-side. Do they WANT to give us completists headaches?
This song is a great example of The Who's early sound, fast but not overly aggressive, a nice touch of brass from John, a good guitar line on the brink of melting down into feedback, and some unique vocal interplay between Pete and Roger on the bridge. They're on fire here.
01. A Legal Matter - to be discussed when I cover the band's debut album, where it makes its premiere.
02. Instant Party [6]
The original version (recorded first, but released later) of "Circles." Now that you're that much acquainted, here comes a curve-ball: this version was originally intended to be the band's next single, their final production with Shel Talmy. It was to have a song entitled "Instant Party Mixture" (can't find it on the YouTube, but as far as I'm concerned you're not missing much) as its b-side. Still with me?
So anyway, Mr. Talmy put out the "A Legal Matter" / "Instant Party" single, ironically becoming a bit of a legal matter for the band. As with The Kinks, Talmy played no insignificant role in the band's early development, but once he'd overstayed his welcome he couldn't have made himself scarce fast enough. That's at least how I feel.
How is this original version here? The trouble is, the song is just okay. It sort of drones along, not as good. It seems like Talmy had begun phoning it in, as they say, with The Who.
01. The Kids Are Alright
02. The Ox (UK single)
02. A Legal Matter (US single)
Again, all album tracks.
01. I'm A Boy [11]
I talked a little bit about this one earlier, so forgive me if it gets redundant. I love this song, and quite frankly I'm shocked it doesn't get any sort of respect for being four years ahead of "Lola" and six years ahead of Lou Reed's "Take A Walk On The Wild Side." I mean, the idea of parents forcing their little boy to dress and behave like a girl? It's sick, twisted, but it's also hilarious! The arrangement is beautiful, with the harmonies on the tail end of the bridge coming straight out of the Brian Wilson playbook. Fantastic!
There's a slower, different version, released on the 1971 compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big, And Bouncy. Equally enjoyable, with a more prominent brass part (which gets a solo in the songs middle), an extra verse, and the tempo somewhere in the maestoso range. Really cool, now somewhat rare since the label will probably never remaster Meaty, Beaty, Big, And Bouncy. Thanks for nothing, jerks!
02. In The City [10]
This John Entwistle tune was all he and Keith, with some guitar overdubs done later by Pete. So the harmonies in the verses are between John and Keith, who sounds quite a bit like Roger here. I've always found this to be a very fun song, very much influenced by surf music (it should be obvious by now Pete was into The Beach Boys, but Keith adored surf music, citing his favorite song ever as "Don't Worry, Baby" by The Beach Boys). A perfect example of the hidden treasures that can be found on the flipsides of singles every once in a blue moon. Mercifully, this song was a bonus track on the 1995 CD reissue of A Quick One.
01. Happy Jack [11]
If you wanted to take 1966 Who and encapsulate them in one song, it's this one. Sheer perfection. The song about a misfit named Jack was a big hit in the UK, but it also broke The Who into the United States. Though they would still have a ways to go before they became a household name, it was a Hell of a start.
In late 1967/early 1968, The Who came really close to starring in their own television series, a British version of The Monkees. Thankfully - or not? - nothing came of it, beyond the promo clip for "Call Me Lightning" posted above as well as this one, featured in The Kids Are Alright. The film does a pretty good job interpreting the song's kinetic energy. (But then I grew up watching it.) It also sums up the band: three complete lunatics, two of whom (Keith and Pete) keep one-upping each other with who can get more cake on their face, John the quiet but equally mad enabler, and Roger, the too-cool-for-school accomplice. Great fun.
02. I've Been Away [9] (UK single)
John Entwistle's b-side is a dark piano-driven waltz about getting locked away for a crime he didn't commit by his own brother. He then vows to murder his brother upon his release. A truly upbeat, commercial-friendly tune, for sure. I love it.
02. Whiskey Man (US single) - see above; album track.
Whew, I didn't think I'd get through all these damned singles!
WHAT?! There's MORE?! DAMMIT!
Ready, Steady, Who! (EP)
01. Disguises [9]
Rather an odd, moody number. Love the oboe solo. The lyrics sound like it could have been from the first album, though its musical arrangement is off-kilter, with swishing effected cymbals springing up throughout the recording, a droning guitar arrangement (in a good way), and some added percussion - claves, I believe. As the only...I hate saying this..."real" song on this collection, this might have fared better as a single. Then again, I don't know much about how EP's fared in their time. They seemed to have been important at some point in time, dying out somewhere in the late 1960's. Still, good song, not as memorable as their singles of this era, but a good bit of studio experimentation.
There's a different version on the BBC Sessions album, although I wish the oboe part had been left intact...that and Roger has that whiny brat vocal that lots of modern pop-punk bands have. Not as good as I remembered it, though the rest of the band gives a more alert performance. They sounded like they were ready to doze off on the Ready, Steady, Who! version, but I think that was the idea.
02. Circles [9]
Same as above, the b-side of "Substitute." It may be a different mix or something, but all this research has made my brain hurt. Given its running time, it's safe to assume it is the shorter, brassier version.
03. Batman [9]
Yes, the theme from the Batman television series, and it's awesome. The bass solo, chugging through the I-IV-V riff like it matters, is one of the coolest moments from 1966 Who. Is it a bit of a toss-off number? Yeah, sure, it is. But you know something? It's a blast!
04. Bucket "T" [9]
A Jan & Dean cover, with Keith Moon singing, this marks part two in a three-part series on the same EP where the band pays tribute to the West Coast sound. (Sure, the "Batman Theme" might have been written by Neal Hefti, a jazz composer, and I have encountered a recording where it's used as the head for a jazz piece, but given the right band it's a Hell of a groove.) In a bizarre, but fitting, twist of luck for The Who, this was a single - with "Run, Run, Run" AS THE B-SIDE - that went to the top of the charts...in Sweden. Even their chart success had a strange sense of humor.
Oh, and their only number one in the United States? The post-Moon piece of shit "You Better, You Bet," which sounds more like a Meat Loaf tune than The Who. Now if you'll pardon me, I need to go vomit. (Note the absence of a YouTube link for the song I just referenced. Look it up at your own risk. It's awful.)
05. Barbara Ann [9]
The Beach Boys made this song popular, and The Who gave it a treatment not unlike "Bucket T," with Keith on lead vocals again, the band flying through it like they popped a handful of Purple Hearts, and a slide whistle solo. Amazing!
BUT WAIT...THERE'S MORE!
I saw this on Wikipedia, and decided to tally this up for shits and giggles...
Jigsaw Puzzle, one of at least four "great lost Who albums," the other three being Who's For Tennis?, Five Foot Car, Four Foot Garage (EP), and Lifehouse. Its status is nowhere near as mythic as, say, Lifehouse, mainly because every song on it got released one way or another. The record is little more than a different presentation of the 1966 Who sound with a different title.
SIDE A
01. I'm A Boy (Slow Version) [10] - reduced to a ten
02. Run, Run, Run [10]
03. Don't Look Away [9]
04. Circles (Version 2) [9]
05. I Need You [10]
06. Showbiz Sonata (original title for "Cobwebs And Strange") [10]
SIDE B
07. In The City [10]
08. Boris The Spider [10]
09. Whiskey Man [11]
10. See My Way [4]
11. Heat Wave [5.5]
12. Barbara Ann [9]
TOTAL: 89.5% B+
(I won't fart around with tilting it, since it never got released...but with that running order I don't think the album starts or ends with fitting songs. And "See My Way" is somehow still intact, yet "So Sad About Us" is nowhere to be found. For shame!)
I'd like to end this trip to Who-land with a special comment on how frustrating it is to completely capture all their singles, in spite of the plethora of bonus cuts on these early albums' reissues. Even some a-sides ("Substitute," "I'm A Boy," "Happy Jack," "Pictures Of Lily") can only be found on compilations.
The best we can hope for from those money-grubbing jerkoffs at the label is one of those overpriced "singles box" deals with each CD holding just the tracks from the singles. (Oh, wait, it exists!) Let's say they had twelve singles...each song could probably fit quite cozily on one 70-odd-minute CD. Makes sense, right? Wrong. They'll just put the two tracks from each single on a separate, regular-sized CD.
Put on your lipstick, lube up, and bend over, because these guys are SCREWING US!
There's a guy running a Who fansite who I asked if he could do a fellow fan a favor and send me the incomparable Entwistle b-side "Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde." (More on him in a second.) The song can be found on a 1968 compilation, the deceptively titled Magic Bus: The Who On Tour, which was released in the late 1980's on CD. It has since been discontinued by the manufacturer, meaning a remaster is probably not in the cards. In other words, it will sound like shit.
It can be found on a remaster of Magic Bus, imported from Japan, at the sensible price of $59.99 new, and (get ready) $162.85. Used.
It can ALSO be found on a compilation originally issued on vinyl by the band's label, considered an official rarities comp, now available on CD for only $52.99 new, $111.17 used.
And yet this jackass gave me a stern, condescending attitude of "You're not asking me to break the law, are you?" When I told him I figured so long as money wasn't changing hands, here's the analogy he gave me...try not to laugh:
"The artist loses money anytime music (which they sell for a profit) is distributed for free.
Its really no different than someone breaking into your house, taking various items, selling them and saying, "did I do something wrong?"
in other words, it is theft. I don't participate in theft of any kind. Perhaps you need to think about that too."
Though I won't name names, his site is actually excellent. He's got an attention to detail akin to my own. Unfortunately, his attitude about sharing - the phrase tape-swapping ring any bells? - is shitty.
Pete Townshend is making nickels off any of the discontinued copies of Magic Bus sold. As for the imports, I have no idea. Probably about the same, possibly less if they're unauthorized. If I felt like Pete (and Roger) needed the money and I was fine paying waaaay too much for music, sure, no problem. A more appropriate analogy, should we even reduce the argument to them, is Pete Townshend opens his wallet and a shit-ton of money comes pouring out. A nickel rolls my way. I pick it up. I pocket it.
I'd like to think the only thing I would have in my house worth a nickel would be a nickel. Pretty sure everything else is of considerably higher value. Why, some items cost about as much as they're charging for those imports!
Who's the thief here again? A frustrated fan, or the shysters who refuse to be sensible about packaging rarities, a multi-billion dollar corporation? Yeah, Who site owner, I have thought about it as you suggested, and my conclusion was that you're a greedy dick, the people at the record label are (somehow) worse, and I still managed to acquire the song - on YouTube. I win.
Excuse my rant, it's frustrating to begin with, and even more frustrating that someone who actually HAS all the songs won't share. If you'd like to talk about copyright violations, I'm sure all those album covers he has posted on his site aren't exactly being paid for...
Yes, it's a tragedy that being a Who fan doesn't mean the same thing as being a Kinks fan, where it's a community of literate, friendly lads (and lasses).
But you know something? I'll bet Mr. Who Site Owner and I can agree that this clip is fucking brilliant:
* I guess I'm too used to all those dumb-shits who comment over at the YouTube, where several of my own videos have gotten harsh, anonymous sentences from people with zero videos to their own name. A hundred people can come up and say, "Good job!," but it only takes that one asshole who says, "It was stupid, and so are you!" that can ruin my week. With this forum, I've come to realize now those pig-ignorant Philistines who've nothing better to do than spread bad vibes under a phony handle probably don't have the patience to read. You may have noticed I tend to be a bit verbose.
But seriously, set aside an afternoon and troll YouTube comments. It says a lot about the nature of the Western world. In short, we're screwed.
** Shel Talmy also produced the early Kinks. While he did a great job shaping both The Who's and The Kinks' early sound, he also sounded like a detached egocentric, unable to tell the difference between his version of "Dead End Street" and the one Ray re-recorded the following day.
^ Yes, that's me...two and a half years younger than I am now. I'm quite embarrassed by it, so go easy on me. I just really think it's a Hell of a trip for a drummer and hope you can at least see that, my own little fuck-ups throughout and all.
It sounds stupid, I'm sure of it: man writes blog, people read blog, man panics. The fact is that I write for my own enjoyment, to sort out how I appreciate music, to critically assess what I love and give a re-examination to artists I've placed on a high pedestal in my youth to see how they've stood up in the time that has passed. Beyond that, I also don't think anything I write is all that good.
Of course, I've said the exact same things about an essay on the Bohumil Hrabal novel Closely Watched Trains and its filmic interpretation that my Czech professor insisted be submitted to an international writing contest sponsored by the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences. I've said the exact same thing about my mini-thesis on The Kinks. I definitely think my feeble attempts at fiction are just that: feeble attempts.
And I will say the same thing about my Master's thesis, whatever it may be. I'm leaning towards Zappa, my father is practically begging me to write about Les Paul (a bit unfair for me, as I am currently not a guitar player - I quip that my being a drummer "barely qualifies me as a musician"), while I myself am thinking Zappa's cultural relations might be too easy, yet at the same time a musicological breakdown of his work is...labyrinthine. That's being polite about it. Maybe the answer rests elsewhere. Oh, well, who gives a fart, I'm breaking my own cardinal rule about not getting autobiographical. I felt I needed to explain my absence.
One quick final thing: I will also admit I am my own harshest critic, and while I reserve the option to not publish a comment on this site I find rude or unflattering*, I didn't have to. Either you guys are starved for decent album reviews or I really do have some skills to speak of as a writer. I would like to thank all of you for leaving comments. It was very touching - thanks to Dave Emlen and his fabulous dedication to The Kinks - and I realized that Kinks fans come in all shapes, sizes, and tastes, but we're all united under the umbrella of Ray Davies' genius. I wish I could say the same for Zappa fans...everyone from leftists like me to classicists to guitar hero rockists to cynical Ron Paul libertarian assholes want to claim him for their own. His widow isn't helping things at all, unless of course dividing the fan base even more sharply than before is considered helpful in some esoteric circle of which I am not aware.
The Hell with it, let's get this started before I lay down on the couch while you read on in an overstuffed leather chair.
I've got lots of issues with The Who, almost to the same extent as The Rolling Stones, though not as dramatically. With The Rolling Stones, I feel like they barely achieved their potential to do great things in their time. That slew of albums from Aftermath to Goat's Head Soup (yes, I'm a Stones fan who loves that album, one of those...) is a great run. I think Some Girls was excellent, though those two interim albums are God-awful. Their longevity is to their detriment. Anthony DeCurtis, citing Glenn Gass in a documentary on Bob Dylan (I know this because Glenn proudly showed this in the Dylan class, saying, "How cool is this! I'm the guy Anthony DeCurtis is talking about! I'm quotable!") said something to the effect that his pre-Love And Theft albums were so not up to par that the quality of his earlier works can begin to come into question.
I love The Rolling Stones when they're at their peak. Unfortunately, this is only a slice of a very inconsistent cake. This is the same band that did Dirty Work. Every album since then is praised upon release as "their best since Some Girls" or, in more daring circles, "their best since Exile On Main Street." Then a couple years go by and we all realize we were just creaming our collective jeans because The Rolling Stones once again set out and proved to us that they're not dead yet, with a leading single that is some rewrite of "Brown Sugar" to make it certain.
With time marching forward, as it tends to do, The Who are digging a similar grave. A lot of people checked out when they lost Keith Moon in 1978. And yet enough time has passed that there are people out their who are completely fine with Face Dances and It's Hard and appreciate them for what they are. Kind of like the rare Three Stooges fan who defends Shemp Howard and in some rare cases prefers him over Curly. And that's fine...but then John Entwistle died the night before the start of their tour, and they carried on.
I won't judge that decision, for Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend to carry on and even release an album in 2006, Endless Wire. Just don't call yourselves The Who!
Going back to the Three Stooges, The Who were sort of a comedy troupe, The Four Stooges of rock and roll. Sure, The Beatles had charm and those cute Liverpudlian accents, The Monkees were cuddly and safe for prepubescent consumption, and The Rolling Stones were ruffians with their defiant nature...but these guys were true hooligans in the sense of fun, contained destruction. (They didn't burn churches, for example.)
Please, do yourself a favor and watch The Kids Are Alright. I'll do my best to describe the band, but the film does it better. These four distinct personalities meshed so badly together that it worked. They were notorious for not getting along, at least back in the day. In present time, Roger and Pete probably lean on each other like Siamese twins. Pete was the serious singer/songwriter of the group, seeking spiritual enlightenment, a mix of the best of Ray Davies and George Harrison. Roger Daltrey was the street smart, pretty face of the group (I don't ever think he was a particularly good-looking man myself) and not a bad singer when he wasn't overdoing it, looking just as likely a dockworker as he was a rock singer. John Entwistle was the token dark, quiet one of the band...yet also the one with the sharpest, driest wit. A snappy dresser, the proverbial anchor as both the bassist and the only one not keen on destroying his gear on stage. (In the hotel rooms, he was just as bad as the next guy. Literally, the next guy I'll be discussing!)
And then there was Keith Moon, the reason I wanted to be a drummer. He was all the great comedic madmen combined, as destructive as Curly Howard, lovable as Harpo Marx, angst-ridden and apt to play dress up as Peter Sellers...and yet also a great drummer. Don't expect him to ever play a straight rhythm & blues-friendly pocket beat, no way...he seemed in perpetual motion, all over his drum kit, and yet with the layout of the band, with a bass pretty much playing lead and the guitar providing rhythm, it worked. I read somewhere his drumming was much like a keyboard arrangement. A bit of a stretch, maybe, but I can say he was able to take what could have been a chorus of chaos on his drum kit and make it work into being both elegant and perfectly rhythmic.
Before the band's invention of bawdy arena rock on Who's Next, before that terrible bucket of overindulgent rectal mucous that is Ken Russell's film version of Tommy, before the countless farewell tours that boast to be the last time - FOR REAL THIS TIME! - only to be disproven a year or so later, before "Eminence Front," before "You Better, You Bet," before Rock Band made them known to an array of 13 year olds who can afford a gaming console but can't afford a low-end guitar so they can play for real, and before CSI cannibalized not just one but three of their songs into cut-and-paste "we're using this for no real reason" theme songs...
...before all that, there was The Who, four guys from Shepherd's Bush in Northern London, who loved R&B and soul, but were terrible at it, their saving grace being one of the great defiant anthems of their time, let alone all time, "My Generation." I'm quite harsh on their first album, in the same way I was with Please Please Me. There's some great songs, precursors to punk (Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols and Mick Jones of The Clash - no relation - have both said that early Who was the music they learned guitar to) like "Out In The Street" and "The Good's Gone." Even when they're whimsical, as on "It's Not True," the song is quite solid musically and on a lyrical level funny.
When the time came for their second album, it was decided that in order to make more money off of their new LP, they would all write at least two songs a piece. Roger wound up doing one, John and Keith each turned in two, and Pete did the rest except for their cover of "Heatwave" by Martha & The Vandellas. The results are surprisingly creative, though there was no doubt some sort of pressure due to the changing current of pop music.
Between Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Rubber Soul in 1965, the bar was raised for the British bands. I'll go ahead and throw The Beach Boys into this mix as well, because alongside Dylan, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye they were the only true innovating artists in America (though much respect goes out to the men behind the consoles, the Phil Spectors and Berry Gordys and Jim Stewarts who took American pop music beyond the realm of Fabian) at that time, though I don't think Gaye and Robinson saw The Beatles as "competition." The scenes on the West Coast were just opening up, because of this fusion of The Beatles and Dylan.
It was up to The Beatles' fellow countrymen (plus The Beach Boys) to keep up with the ante raised by those three albums. A standard was established, and whether or not you could overcome that hurdle was a litmus test. Are you willing to go out of your comfort zone? The Rolling Stones did it with Aftermath, an album of all-original tunes without a single cover to be found. Taking more of a cue from Dylan, Ray Davies did "A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion," and "Sunny Afternoon" before ending 1966 with the one-two punch of Face To Face and "Dead End Street," firmly establishing The Kinks as an individual, trend-bucking ensemble. (Right in time for them to get banned from the United States, but them's the breaks.) The Beach Boys did Pet Sounds, which is a producer's album through and through.
Other British groups thankfully (Herman's Hermits) and regrettably (The Yardbirds, Them, The Animals) didn't quite make it. As much as I love the Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds, producer Mickie Most took them out of their sonically experimental territory heard on Roger The Engineer and into psychedelic pop. With The Animals is was a combination of their lack of a strong central songwriter (though that was the case with Them and The Yardbirds as well) and the fact that half the band drank too much and the other half smoked too much, and I'm not talking about ciggies.
Though they were late bloomers, in this weird turf between The Kinks' emergence and latter-day British Invasion acts like The Creation, The Pretty Things, and The Small Faces, The Who responded to this radical shift with flying colors. I don't rank A Quick One as one of the all-time greats, there were still some kinks (sorry!) to be worked out, but when they were on you'd better buckle the Hell up. What weighed their first album down so badly was their attempts at James Brown numbers. They're so bad...well, they're not quite good (though my father ranks The Who Sing My Generation as one of the funniest albums ever, alongside Elvis Presley's Christmas record). They're pretty crummy, actually.
It was "My Generation" that put them on the map, and their follow-up single, "Substitute," carried on this message of angst and a surprisingly honest message of "I look pretty tall / But my heels are high." The song isn't the same aural assault that "My Generation" was, but just as strong in every respect. Producer Shel Talmy**, apparently in an act of spite over the release of the self-produced "Substitute," put out the song "A Legal Matter" as a single. A step backwards in the short-term, yes...but thank God history has ignored this slight blunder.
Their next single was "I'm A Boy," a beautifully arranged and funny story of a song. It was part of a larger sequence of songs Pete had in mind, to be called "Quads." I can't find much else on it, other than that they would be thematically related songs. A couple has quadruplets, expecting four little girls...but they get three girls and a boy, who they subsequently raise as though he were a girl. Groundbreaking for its time, still a bit shocking today (maybe more since everyone seems to be too politically correct for their own good), "I'm A Boy" was another step further in showing the band had morphed beyond their Mod origins, venturing into pop art, albeit musically, in the same way that I consider The Residents to be the musical embodiment of Dada.
A few stray singles from their first album, "The Kids Are Alright" (another excellent tune) and "La-La-La Lies" (eh...not so good) and the EP Ready, Steady, Who! were floated out to keep the band in the public eye.
Then came "Happy Jack." It was a #3 hit in the UK, but more importantly it got The Who into the US charts, peaking at #24. It's a great song to hear, even today...it sounds like it's on the verge of exploding during the verses, and when the chorus comes along the band takes the idea of tension-and-release to the maximum. The word "assault" keeps coming up in these descriptions. I know in this day and age of death metal, speed metal, hardcore punk, etc., "Happy Jack" and its chorus probably sounds like a walk in the park when compared to Napalm Death or Minor Threat. Once again, just put it in the context of 1966. No record bounced along the way it did, not even "Paperback Writer."
"Happy Jack" was recorded after A Quick One, but released before it as a single. A Quick One has a spirit to it, of a band with a newfound sense of freedom, the eccentric (but eager to push the envelope) Kit Lambert behind the console, and ready to pull out the stops and establish themselves as their own band. It took The Kinks' string of sardonic folk-rock singles and Face To Face to show their chops beyond the (delightfully sublime) proto-metal of "You Really Got Me." In a very similar manner, A Quick One was The Who's first proper album in their own realm without relying on cover tunes or trying to emulate someone else's sound or style.
And away we go. Buckle your seatbelts...at least for side A.
01. Run, Run, Run [10]
As far as album openers go, and there are many, many great ones out there, this is like the running of the bulls captured by a four-piece band. They pound this one out like their lives depend on it. Lyrically, it's quite an inversion of the somewhat scornful take on women in "The Good's Gone," "A Legal Matter," and "It's Not True." On those three tunes from their first album, the girl in question is the source of strife, in the latter examples attempting to ruin the narrator's life. Mean, moody, and magnificent. But on "Run, Run, Run," the song's subject is an object of sympathy, a hapless chick encountering nothing but horrible luck and encountering symbols of foreboding superstition.
Beyond the whimsical lyrics, sung with the same brooding voice of "The Good's Gone," the song is a musical bombardment. Keith is pounding out four beats a measure on the snare, bass, and his cymbals, Pete and John do their things quite aptly - I love the way John brings the band back into the final verse with those solid triplets out of the solo - and Roger's double-tracked lead sounds like two equally strong performances, of which they could not pick a favorite, at least to my ears. Great song, and proof that The Who were a Hell of a hard rock band...a good three years before Led Zeppelin.
For shits and giggles, and further proof that I love the Internet, here's the song in mono. Being a slightly different mix, keep your ears open for some feedback around 1:45 in the song.
02. Boris The Spider [10]
One of John's two songs, this one being his songwriting debut on a Who album (his "In The City" was the b-side to "I'm A Boy"). He hits the ground running with a Who classic, though not a single, greeted by fans like an old friend at concerts. During the verses, John demonstrates what a strong singing voice he has, before the un-human basso chorus and the falsetto "creeeeepy, craaaaawlie" bridge show off what a dynamic set of pipes he has. Again, there's a sense of lyrical humor in this song, with the music's heaviness throwing things off-kilter in a good way, in that the song's hero sees a spider and kills it with a book. That's it, but it's turned into a 2:30 pop song. Terrific!
03. I Need You [10]
Here's something you don't see often: a drummer writing a song. Not only that, but a Hell of a good song with a good melody and a rollicking performance to boot. The song's original title was "I Need You (Like I Need A Hole In The Head)." Lyrically, it's a bit choppy. I'm led to understand it was a bit of a snap at The Beatles, as Mr. Moon felt that they talked behind his back in a code - I should probably mention that the members of the band at this point were probably still popping amphetamines which can induce paranoia, make you a better musician, and lead to the creation of Blonde On Blonde - and the voice at 1:12 is Keith doing his imitation of John Lennon.
This song also features my favorite presentation of the drums on any song recorded, ever, on those choruses, where the cymbals almost wash out the entire rest of the band. It kind of sounds like that when you're playing with a band, so I won't deny its accuracy, never mind the resulting effect just sounds cool. By the way, that's Keith on lead vocal, not Pete, though I can see how one could get the two confused.
04. Whiskey Man [11]
My favorite song on the album, by far, which is saying plenty given the last three songs. John sings lead again as he did on "Boris The Spider" (sounding an awful lot like Roger), turning in another great performance. There's also a French horn solo, played by Mr. Entwistle. And it's perfect. The song is about an alcoholic who is joined by the "whiskey man" whenever he drinks. As we learn, it's a figment of his imagination, induced by the alcoholism. With the final reprise of the song's opening lines, John sings it like a looney rocking back and forth in his "little padded cell," reminding himself why he's there in the first place. Woefully overlooked, I feel, in favor of its arachnid cousin track, this is the better of the two, and one of The Who's finest moments as a band.
05. Heatwave [5.5]
This is where it stops being iconic. To its merit, the song is driven by the bass. After ripping it up on the first four tracks, this one totters along rather clumsily. The original by Martha & The Vandellas was catchy, at a stomping, clap-along tempo. But here, it seems like it doesn't quite pick up momentum, I feel at the wrong tempo, but at the same time it sounds like an outtake for what could have been a really good Motown cover (see their amazing version of "Dancing In The Street," also by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, from The Who BBC Sessions and you'll know what I'm talking about). A good touch of wasted potential, I'm afraid.
To make matters worse/better (depending on who you ask), the American release of this album removed this song in favor of their latest single, "Happy Jack," which also became the title of the LP. For once, the US version of the album is in fact BETTER. God, I cringe saying that...but it's true.
06. Cobwebs And Strange [10]
Thankfully, "Heatwave" is a mere 117 awkward, unsure seconds long, meaning we aren't in the "they could have done better" territory for an extended period. This is Keith's other song, and, um...it's out there. For any other band, this would arguably be about as weird as they got. But over the next few years, Keith contributed some real oddities as single b-sides ("Dogs Part Two," "Waspman") that are at least just as odd and unique as this one.
It's a march, it's a series of bitchin' drum solos...and that's it, but it's maniacal good fun. Hopefully you're watching the video attached for this song. It's the promo film for "Call Me Lightning" intercut with footage and photographs depicting Keith's wild side, from The Kids Are Alright. He may have only lived 31 years, but it seems he had a lot of fun. A lot. However much of it he remembered at the end of the day is highly speculative.
07. Don't Look Away [9]
The band opens the second half of the record with one of Pete's. "Run, Run, Run" this is not, but it shows Pete had as much capability to write a Beatlesque pop song (I can picture McCartney singing this on Help! or Rubber Soul, right down to the slightly countrified solo that could have come out of George's Gretsch hollowbody, the one he had on The Ed Sullivan Show) as he could do an anthemic "WHY DON'T YOU ALL F-F-F-FADE AWAY" declaration of independence set to a no-holds-barred musical backdrop. I'm docking a point for this one being maybe a hair too derivative, but a 9 is still a good score. Like Aftermath, I used to piss on side B of this record with contempt, if only because these songs didn't have the hyperbolic dynamics of, say, "Run, Run, Run" or "Cobwebs And Strange." Now in my advanced age of 22 (having first consciously heard this album at age three, later buying the CD at age 12), I am once again eating my words. Pass the ketchup, please.
08. See My Way [4]
On second thought, hold the ketchup. This song is pretty dull. The liner notes for BBC Sessions described this as being fairly tentative compared to the version they did for Auntie Beeb (which I can't find on the YouTube, proving once again why I hate the Internet). This just sounds unfinished, again, like they could have done a significantly better take. Whatever instrument that is playing the solo (sort of a weird organ or a flute-voiced organ?) sounds stupid to me. John's bassline saves this song from being a lo-fi heap of parrot droppings, to crib a Python quote.
Did I mention this song was written by Roger?
09. So Sad About Us [10]
Mod-rock's last stand, at least until British punk shook hands with New Wave and gave us The Jam, The Buzzcocks, et al. This is a great song, and its cover by The Jam (and others) has given this song a legacy as a shimmering example of Mod rock, the first Britpop song for my money. (So they didn't just invent punk music!) A step up from "Don't Look Away" in all the right ways, a pop song unique to Mr. Townshend's pen, very much in the vein of The Who's own style and sound. One of hundreds of semi-obscure album tracks (like "Picture Book" by The Kinks, "Not A Second Time" by The Beatles, or "Take It Or Leave It" by The Rolling Stones) out there that would/should/could have been smash singles in a perfect world, had they been released as such. It's also one of the best breakup songs of all time, period.
Here's a clip of them doing it live, which I'd never seen before. It's always neat to see these once-rare clips that were unavailable when Jeff Stein was assembling The Kids Are Alright.
10. A Quick One, While He's Away [8.5]
I've been spoiled on this song. Its vastly superior live rendition from The Rolling Stones' unreleased-until-1996 Rock & Roll Circus TV special, featured in The Kids Are Alright, is as far as I'm concerned the greatest real-time performance ever captured, and The Who's best moment as a band pre-Tommy. It is also a tour de force^ if you're a drummer.
But this version? Let me play like the politicians do and dodge that question. The story behind its inception is that the band had about ten minutes to fill on the record. Kit Lambert suggested to Pete that he do a ten-minute song. He initially balked, saying a ten minute song was unheard of, and that "British pop songs are two minute fifty, by tradition!" as Pete explained to Melvyn Bragg in 1974. The agreement struck was that Pete write a ten-minute story, with each segment of the story being a song in its own right.
Here's the breakdown of it:
[0:00-1:59] Her Man's Been Gone / Crying Town, then after a really bad edit...
[2:00-3:31] We Have A Remedy
[3:32-5:13] Ivor The Engine Driver
[5:14-6:40] Soon Be Home
[6:40-9:10] You Are Forgiven
It isn't as bad as I remembered, listening to it again, once I get the blistering stage treatment out of my head...pretending it doesn't exist. What sounds like white noise during "Ivor The Engine Driver" is in fact the crash cymbals sped up and compressed, to emulate a train engine. It doesn't work out as such, but still creates an interesting effect. The performance on the whole is a bit rough-shod, though the production on "We Have A Remedy" and "You Are Forgiven" is phenomenally done. Its polish makes it obvious the band had heard Pet Sounds.
This blows "Going Home" out of the water, that's for sure; the boys here don't seem keen on wasting your time. It's an interestingly done recording, I'd love to hear the early takes of it. Even though it sounds brittle in parts, the melodies throughout are exceptional. For this to have just been from one songwriter's pen is the telltale sign of Mr. Townshend's genius. There are bits I'm not crazy about: the vocal interlude between "We Have A Remedy" and "Ivor The Engine Driver," with the heavy echoes, sounds thin...I don't like it. It sticks out to me for some reason.
For what it is, a pressing of the boundaries for what pop music could/should be, in this case an extended story made up of several short songs, this is a successful experiment. If only more progressive rock acts had followed suit instead of pursuing the pompous classically-oriented avenues that abound with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Yes...ugh...
For this tune, which I once hated (for real!), I'm giving The Who an A+ for effort, B- for the final product, averaging out for the score it's earned. Pete would return to the idea of a larger work of music telling stories or at least featuring a concept, but I'll save those for later.
Subtotal: 88% B+
Replayability Factor: 1
I can hear side A anytime, anyplace, anywhere. Side B, which I do enjoy aside from "See My Way," is pretty good...but there's too many nuances in "A Quick One, While He's Away" that dictate careful listening. Careful listening, as in, headphones are almost mandatory to enjoy it all.
Consistency Factor: 1
For them, this was groundbreaking. I can't emphasize enough that they really came into their own with this album. The final track was the first venture into conceptual work, which Pete would actively pursue for the next seven years on the band's albums. Much of their "classic" career is given its grounding here. However, the format of Pete having all of four (!) of the album's ten songs is unheard of elsewhere. On all future albums, there's a song or three by John (at the least, zero on Quadrophenia, at most three on Who Are You and It's Hard) and aside from "Tommy's Holiday Camp," credited to Keith (but written by Pete, who gave Keith credit for the idea of a holiday camp) and a few rare cover tunes, THAT'S IT. This was Pete's game, much like Ray Davies' role as the dominant songwriter in The Kinks, with the occasional contribution from brother Dave. It's a great album, this one, but hardly representative of The Who and each member's roles within the band.
External Factors: 2
Inventing punk music wasn't good enough for them, so they had to go and invent progressive rock with "A Quick One, While He's Away," with its segments and tempo changes, which they in turn streamlined into an amazing live workout. Beyond that, nowhere else can you hear the band working collectively and creatively. As I said above under "Consistency Factor," this is the only album where you'll hear songs by Keith Moon. Or Roger, though in this case I say that's fine with me. 1966 was the year the rest of the hip world responded to electric Dylan and the matured Beatles, and though they were still freshmen in the grand scheme of the British Invasion, they passed the test.
TOTAL: 92% A-
Singles:
(There's a LOT, so get comfy!)
01. Substitute [10]
Iconic Who, a more honest approach of examining youth culture by way of identity crises and putting on fronts. It is nowhere near as madhouse as "My Generation," with its acoustic guitar riff, but John and Keith cover the sonic low end of the song quite well. At this stage, Roger sounds like he's still singing a bit higher than he should, but given the lyrical themes of insecurity throughout this song it works. A great single by a band on their way to greater things.
02. Circles [9]
Make no bones about it, The Who's single discography is a confusing mess of only-available-on-rarities-compilations-from-the-1980's, a song being the b-side in the UK but not in the US, only to be put out as a US b-side the following year (but in a different mix) - it is infinitely frustrating.
Take this song, for instance. This version is entitled "Circles," though it was erroneously labeled "Instant Party" on some other issues. THEN, they re-record the song (see below), entitle it "Instant Party," and it's the next single's b-side. Do they WANT to give us completists headaches?
This song is a great example of The Who's early sound, fast but not overly aggressive, a nice touch of brass from John, a good guitar line on the brink of melting down into feedback, and some unique vocal interplay between Pete and Roger on the bridge. They're on fire here.
01. A Legal Matter - to be discussed when I cover the band's debut album, where it makes its premiere.
02. Instant Party [6]
The original version (recorded first, but released later) of "Circles." Now that you're that much acquainted, here comes a curve-ball: this version was originally intended to be the band's next single, their final production with Shel Talmy. It was to have a song entitled "Instant Party Mixture" (can't find it on the YouTube, but as far as I'm concerned you're not missing much) as its b-side. Still with me?
So anyway, Mr. Talmy put out the "A Legal Matter" / "Instant Party" single, ironically becoming a bit of a legal matter for the band. As with The Kinks, Talmy played no insignificant role in the band's early development, but once he'd overstayed his welcome he couldn't have made himself scarce fast enough. That's at least how I feel.
How is this original version here? The trouble is, the song is just okay. It sort of drones along, not as good. It seems like Talmy had begun phoning it in, as they say, with The Who.
01. The Kids Are Alright
02. The Ox (UK single)
02. A Legal Matter (US single)
Again, all album tracks.
01. I'm A Boy [11]
I talked a little bit about this one earlier, so forgive me if it gets redundant. I love this song, and quite frankly I'm shocked it doesn't get any sort of respect for being four years ahead of "Lola" and six years ahead of Lou Reed's "Take A Walk On The Wild Side." I mean, the idea of parents forcing their little boy to dress and behave like a girl? It's sick, twisted, but it's also hilarious! The arrangement is beautiful, with the harmonies on the tail end of the bridge coming straight out of the Brian Wilson playbook. Fantastic!
There's a slower, different version, released on the 1971 compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big, And Bouncy. Equally enjoyable, with a more prominent brass part (which gets a solo in the songs middle), an extra verse, and the tempo somewhere in the maestoso range. Really cool, now somewhat rare since the label will probably never remaster Meaty, Beaty, Big, And Bouncy. Thanks for nothing, jerks!
02. In The City [10]
This John Entwistle tune was all he and Keith, with some guitar overdubs done later by Pete. So the harmonies in the verses are between John and Keith, who sounds quite a bit like Roger here. I've always found this to be a very fun song, very much influenced by surf music (it should be obvious by now Pete was into The Beach Boys, but Keith adored surf music, citing his favorite song ever as "Don't Worry, Baby" by The Beach Boys). A perfect example of the hidden treasures that can be found on the flipsides of singles every once in a blue moon. Mercifully, this song was a bonus track on the 1995 CD reissue of A Quick One.
01. Happy Jack [11]
If you wanted to take 1966 Who and encapsulate them in one song, it's this one. Sheer perfection. The song about a misfit named Jack was a big hit in the UK, but it also broke The Who into the United States. Though they would still have a ways to go before they became a household name, it was a Hell of a start.
In late 1967/early 1968, The Who came really close to starring in their own television series, a British version of The Monkees. Thankfully - or not? - nothing came of it, beyond the promo clip for "Call Me Lightning" posted above as well as this one, featured in The Kids Are Alright. The film does a pretty good job interpreting the song's kinetic energy. (But then I grew up watching it.) It also sums up the band: three complete lunatics, two of whom (Keith and Pete) keep one-upping each other with who can get more cake on their face, John the quiet but equally mad enabler, and Roger, the too-cool-for-school accomplice. Great fun.
02. I've Been Away [9] (UK single)
John Entwistle's b-side is a dark piano-driven waltz about getting locked away for a crime he didn't commit by his own brother. He then vows to murder his brother upon his release. A truly upbeat, commercial-friendly tune, for sure. I love it.
02. Whiskey Man (US single) - see above; album track.
Whew, I didn't think I'd get through all these damned singles!
WHAT?! There's MORE?! DAMMIT!
Ready, Steady, Who! (EP)
01. Disguises [9]
Rather an odd, moody number. Love the oboe solo. The lyrics sound like it could have been from the first album, though its musical arrangement is off-kilter, with swishing effected cymbals springing up throughout the recording, a droning guitar arrangement (in a good way), and some added percussion - claves, I believe. As the only...I hate saying this..."real" song on this collection, this might have fared better as a single. Then again, I don't know much about how EP's fared in their time. They seemed to have been important at some point in time, dying out somewhere in the late 1960's. Still, good song, not as memorable as their singles of this era, but a good bit of studio experimentation.
There's a different version on the BBC Sessions album, although I wish the oboe part had been left intact...that and Roger has that whiny brat vocal that lots of modern pop-punk bands have. Not as good as I remembered it, though the rest of the band gives a more alert performance. They sounded like they were ready to doze off on the Ready, Steady, Who! version, but I think that was the idea.
02. Circles [9]
Same as above, the b-side of "Substitute." It may be a different mix or something, but all this research has made my brain hurt. Given its running time, it's safe to assume it is the shorter, brassier version.
03. Batman [9]
Yes, the theme from the Batman television series, and it's awesome. The bass solo, chugging through the I-IV-V riff like it matters, is one of the coolest moments from 1966 Who. Is it a bit of a toss-off number? Yeah, sure, it is. But you know something? It's a blast!
04. Bucket "T" [9]
A Jan & Dean cover, with Keith Moon singing, this marks part two in a three-part series on the same EP where the band pays tribute to the West Coast sound. (Sure, the "Batman Theme" might have been written by Neal Hefti, a jazz composer, and I have encountered a recording where it's used as the head for a jazz piece, but given the right band it's a Hell of a groove.) In a bizarre, but fitting, twist of luck for The Who, this was a single - with "Run, Run, Run" AS THE B-SIDE - that went to the top of the charts...in Sweden. Even their chart success had a strange sense of humor.
Oh, and their only number one in the United States? The post-Moon piece of shit "You Better, You Bet," which sounds more like a Meat Loaf tune than The Who. Now if you'll pardon me, I need to go vomit. (Note the absence of a YouTube link for the song I just referenced. Look it up at your own risk. It's awful.)
05. Barbara Ann [9]
The Beach Boys made this song popular, and The Who gave it a treatment not unlike "Bucket T," with Keith on lead vocals again, the band flying through it like they popped a handful of Purple Hearts, and a slide whistle solo. Amazing!
BUT WAIT...THERE'S MORE!
I saw this on Wikipedia, and decided to tally this up for shits and giggles...
Jigsaw Puzzle, one of at least four "great lost Who albums," the other three being Who's For Tennis?, Five Foot Car, Four Foot Garage (EP), and Lifehouse. Its status is nowhere near as mythic as, say, Lifehouse, mainly because every song on it got released one way or another. The record is little more than a different presentation of the 1966 Who sound with a different title.
SIDE A
01. I'm A Boy (Slow Version) [10] - reduced to a ten
02. Run, Run, Run [10]
03. Don't Look Away [9]
04. Circles (Version 2) [9]
05. I Need You [10]
06. Showbiz Sonata (original title for "Cobwebs And Strange") [10]
SIDE B
07. In The City [10]
08. Boris The Spider [10]
09. Whiskey Man [11]
10. See My Way [4]
11. Heat Wave [5.5]
12. Barbara Ann [9]
TOTAL: 89.5% B+
(I won't fart around with tilting it, since it never got released...but with that running order I don't think the album starts or ends with fitting songs. And "See My Way" is somehow still intact, yet "So Sad About Us" is nowhere to be found. For shame!)
I'd like to end this trip to Who-land with a special comment on how frustrating it is to completely capture all their singles, in spite of the plethora of bonus cuts on these early albums' reissues. Even some a-sides ("Substitute," "I'm A Boy," "Happy Jack," "Pictures Of Lily") can only be found on compilations.
The best we can hope for from those money-grubbing jerkoffs at the label is one of those overpriced "singles box" deals with each CD holding just the tracks from the singles. (Oh, wait, it exists!) Let's say they had twelve singles...each song could probably fit quite cozily on one 70-odd-minute CD. Makes sense, right? Wrong. They'll just put the two tracks from each single on a separate, regular-sized CD.
Put on your lipstick, lube up, and bend over, because these guys are SCREWING US!
There's a guy running a Who fansite who I asked if he could do a fellow fan a favor and send me the incomparable Entwistle b-side "Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde." (More on him in a second.) The song can be found on a 1968 compilation, the deceptively titled Magic Bus: The Who On Tour, which was released in the late 1980's on CD. It has since been discontinued by the manufacturer, meaning a remaster is probably not in the cards. In other words, it will sound like shit.
It can be found on a remaster of Magic Bus, imported from Japan, at the sensible price of $59.99 new, and (get ready) $162.85. Used.
It can ALSO be found on a compilation originally issued on vinyl by the band's label, considered an official rarities comp, now available on CD for only $52.99 new, $111.17 used.
And yet this jackass gave me a stern, condescending attitude of "You're not asking me to break the law, are you?" When I told him I figured so long as money wasn't changing hands, here's the analogy he gave me...try not to laugh:
"The artist loses money anytime music (which they sell for a profit) is distributed for free.
Its really no different than someone breaking into your house, taking various items, selling them and saying, "did I do something wrong?"
in other words, it is theft. I don't participate in theft of any kind. Perhaps you need to think about that too."
Though I won't name names, his site is actually excellent. He's got an attention to detail akin to my own. Unfortunately, his attitude about sharing - the phrase tape-swapping ring any bells? - is shitty.
Pete Townshend is making nickels off any of the discontinued copies of Magic Bus sold. As for the imports, I have no idea. Probably about the same, possibly less if they're unauthorized. If I felt like Pete (and Roger) needed the money and I was fine paying waaaay too much for music, sure, no problem. A more appropriate analogy, should we even reduce the argument to them, is Pete Townshend opens his wallet and a shit-ton of money comes pouring out. A nickel rolls my way. I pick it up. I pocket it.
I'd like to think the only thing I would have in my house worth a nickel would be a nickel. Pretty sure everything else is of considerably higher value. Why, some items cost about as much as they're charging for those imports!
Who's the thief here again? A frustrated fan, or the shysters who refuse to be sensible about packaging rarities, a multi-billion dollar corporation? Yeah, Who site owner, I have thought about it as you suggested, and my conclusion was that you're a greedy dick, the people at the record label are (somehow) worse, and I still managed to acquire the song - on YouTube. I win.
Excuse my rant, it's frustrating to begin with, and even more frustrating that someone who actually HAS all the songs won't share. If you'd like to talk about copyright violations, I'm sure all those album covers he has posted on his site aren't exactly being paid for...
Yes, it's a tragedy that being a Who fan doesn't mean the same thing as being a Kinks fan, where it's a community of literate, friendly lads (and lasses).
But you know something? I'll bet Mr. Who Site Owner and I can agree that this clip is fucking brilliant:
* I guess I'm too used to all those dumb-shits who comment over at the YouTube, where several of my own videos have gotten harsh, anonymous sentences from people with zero videos to their own name. A hundred people can come up and say, "Good job!," but it only takes that one asshole who says, "It was stupid, and so are you!" that can ruin my week. With this forum, I've come to realize now those pig-ignorant Philistines who've nothing better to do than spread bad vibes under a phony handle probably don't have the patience to read. You may have noticed I tend to be a bit verbose.
But seriously, set aside an afternoon and troll YouTube comments. It says a lot about the nature of the Western world. In short, we're screwed.
** Shel Talmy also produced the early Kinks. While he did a great job shaping both The Who's and The Kinks' early sound, he also sounded like a detached egocentric, unable to tell the difference between his version of "Dead End Street" and the one Ray re-recorded the following day.
^ Yes, that's me...two and a half years younger than I am now. I'm quite embarrassed by it, so go easy on me. I just really think it's a Hell of a trip for a drummer and hope you can at least see that, my own little fuck-ups throughout and all.
Don't agree? Leave a comment!
New? Check out my entry on how I rate my records!
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