Masterpiece: Electric Warrior

[Today: Marc Bolan bangs a gong...]

Elfin starchild, psychedelic wizard, electric warrior. T. Rex mastermind Marc Bolan was all of the above, as well as a guitar hero who wore plenty of eye-liner and glitter and wrote so many hit songs that he smashed sales records set by The Beatles. Bolan and T. Rex pioneered the sound (and look) that would become known as Glam Rock and provide David Bowie a ladder to superstardom, and the early-70′s found them at the top of their game, in the midst of a run of Top 10 UK singles, and at the center of a British craze known as ‘T-Rextasy’.

With their 1971 album Electric Warrior, T. Rex captured the essence of Glam – infectious three-minute singles full of fat guitar hooks, fairy dust and casual innuendoes. Lead single ‘Bang A Gong (Get It On)’ was the group’s biggest hit, going #1 in the UK and Top 10 in the US. ‘Jeepster’ is even better, and might be one of the most infectious grooves ever laid to wax – the kind of tune that worms its way into your brain and never leaves. ‘Mambo Sun’ and ‘Cosmic Dancer’ are links between the peace & love 60′s and the raunchy guitar 70′s. Meanwhile, album closer ‘Rip Off’ perfectly conveys the teenage anxiety that everything is bullshit. Electric Warrior is the kind of album that validates the format and rewards a complete listen – every song works together to set a mood, and the whole is much greater than its parts.

T. Rex swam against the musical tide of their times in just about every respect. While their contemporaries were reveling in masturbatory solos and diffuse concepts, Bolan and Rex were churning out catchy, radio-friendly singles that celebrated the same stuff as 50′s rock & roll – girls, cars and music itself. Ironically, the very disposability of their music is what keeps T. Rex sounding fresh year after year. Bolan would die in a car crash in 1977, after his star had dimmed considerably, but as long as there are Saturday nights and kids looking for some action, the music he made with T. Rex will live on.

Listen: Jeepster

Listen: Mambo Sun

Listen: Rip Off

Doubleshot Tuesday: Fire On The Bayou/ Crawfish Fiesta

[Today: The fattest Tuesday of the year...]

A pair of albums for a Mardi Gras day…

Listen: Talkin’ ‘Bout New Orleans [The Meters]

Listen: Big Chief [Professor Longhair]

Listen: Fire On The Bayou [The Meters]

Listen: Crawfish Fiesta [Professor Longhair]

Stuck In My Head: Generation Landslide

Against my better instincts, I have a real fondness for Alice Cooper. Their slasher-flick schtick and frontman Vincent Furnier’s right-leaning politics would normally be enough to put me off for good, but this band has the kind of grease in its wheels that I can get behind. In particular, ‘Generation Landslide’ (from their 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies) is a scathing take-down of institutionalized greed that has never rung more true.

The album cover is a garish faux-snakeskin wallet, and when Furnier isn’t hissing like an angry cobra, he’s growling like a cornered animal. “And I laugh to myself at the men and the ladies/Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies.” It’s easy to imagine the Wall Street fatcats who plundered the US economy, sitting in their penthouses and chuckling to themselves as they think something along those very lines.

The song describes the nightmare landscape of a decaying society – needles and poison and survivalist mothers huddled in basements with their children. It also features a some decent harmonica and a killer guitar solo. This was Alice Cooper’s over-the-top jab at spoiled rich kids, but 35 years later, the billion dollar baby stands as the perfect symbol of a subprime economy.

Listen: Generation Landslide

Weekend Playlist

Here’s a sampling of what was in our ears over the weekend…

Sex Pistols | Never Mind The Bollocks

Woody Guthrie | Dust Bowl Ballads

Downliners Sect | The Rock Sect’s In

Prince | Purple Rain

Blackalicious | Nia

Fred Eaglesmith | Lipstick, Lies & Gasoline

Tom Waits | Swordfishtrombones

Willard Grant Conspiracy | Everything’s Fine

Old & In The Way | Old & In The Way

Lifesavas | Spirit In Stone

Groove Armada | Lovebox

Minutemen | Double Nickels On The Dime

Nick Lowe | Basher: The Best Of

The Smiths | Hatful Of Hollow

Joe Walsh | Look What I Did: The JW Anthology

Mother’s Finest | Not Yer Mother’s Funk: The Very Best Of

Various Artists | The Rhino Disco Box

Lightnin’ Slim | Rooster Blues

John Prine | John Prine

Cold War Kids | Robbers & Cowards

Little Barrie | We Are Little Barrie

Mazzy Star | So Tonight That I Might See

Terry Reid | River

Gene Clark | No Other

Wings | Wings Greatest

Bryan Sutton | Bluegrass Guitar

Manu Chao | Proxima Estacion… Esperanza

Massive Attack | Mezzanine

Outkast | Stankonia

Various Artists | Brainfreeze Breaks

DJ Shadow | Entroducing…

Neu! | Neu! 75

Stevie Ray Vaughan | The Sky Is Crying

R.L. Burnside | Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down

Flying Burrito Brothers | Gilded Palace Of Sin

Sidestepper | 3AM (In Beats We Trust)

Dino Valente | Dino Valente

John Legend | Get Lifted

Magic Moment: Donald O’Connor Climbs The Walls

The P and I caught Singing In The Rain on DVD last night, and while I’m not a huge fan of musicals, this movie is really something special. Gene Kelly is outstanding, of course, but his co-star Donald O’Connor steals a couple of scenes with some sparkling dance moves. The last 30 seconds of his number ‘Make Em Laugh’ are incredible, as O’Connor first spins himself around on the floor while laughing maniacally (later spoofed by Homer Simpson) before reverse-somersaulting multiple times high off the walls. These moves appear to be physically impossible, but it’s not a camera trick, it’s just Donald O’Connor…

Buried Treasure: Mexican R ‘n’ B

[Today: The Stairs lead to nowhere...]

“This is ENTERTAINMENT, this is analogue madness, for an unsuspecting universe.” The liner notes to The Stairs’ tragically underappreciated 1992 album Mexican R ‘n’ B read like psychedelic gloating, but those three phrases sum up the fortunes of the band behind the greatest ‘lost’ album of the 90′s. Its 57 minutes are made up of 19 lo-fi, three-minute jewels that would each fit comfortably on Lenny Kaye’s legendary compilation Nuggets.

But timing is everything, and by releasing an album during the height of grunge that sounded like it came straight from a 60′s garage, The Stairs missed their window of opportunity by about six or eight years. Had they dropped this beauty on the other end of the decade, when bands like The White Stripes were making raw fuzz and dirty blooze all the rage, who knows what might have become of them. This great debut certainly deserved a follow-up, but when it stiffed, the group’s label cut them loose.

The scant few reviews of this album tend to dwell on whether or not the songs are tongue-in-cheek parodies of 60′s music or genuine homage to a long lost sound. Either way, lead singer Edgar “Summertyme” Jones sings with a fierce growl that’s pitched midway between Aftermath-era Mick Jagger and Captain Beefheart. Songs titles like ‘Weed Bus’ and ‘Mr. Window Pane’ lend credence to the parody angle, but these slabs of day-glo fuzz jump and reach well beyond their influences.

In an appallingly shortsighted review, Allmusic.com concluded that The Stairs’ “blatant theft of entire riffs from the Who and the Byrds keeps them from achieving anything remotely valuable.” Nothing could be further from the truth – Mexican R ‘n’ B sounds like the ‘Oo and Byrds dropped acid and made a great album together, which is an altogether different proposition. This lost masterpiece will thrill any fan of the wooshing psychedelic 60′s.

Listen: Flying Machine

Listen: Weed Bus

Listen: Russian R ‘n’ B (The World Shall Not Be Saved)

Listen: Sometimes The World Escapes Me

Masterpiece: OK Computer

[Today: Radiohead go where no band has gone before...]

In the mid-90′s, aliens touched down near Oxford, England, and – displeased with the ascendence of grunge music – brainwashed the band Radiohead so that within a few years the group would recreate the symphonies of the universe, as channeled through the motion and humdrum of life on earth.

How else to explain OK Computer? This 1997 album was so out of its time and ahead of the curve that it was often referred to as the Dark Side Of The Moon for the 90′s, and in its haunting exploration of the human condition, that’s exactly what it was. But comparing Radiohead to anyone – even Pink Floyd – is a disservice to a band that embraced the possibilities of electronic, computer-enhanced sounds at a time when every other band on the planet was trying to sound like Black Sabbath Jr.

Symphonic and elegant yet paranoid and claustrophobic, the tunes on OK Computer interlock to form a picture of a world at odds with itself and the technology driving it. Radiohead understood what Aldous Huxley was getting at when he wrote that civilization is sterilization, and the music here sees the cold edge of reason triumph over emotion time and again. ‘The Tourist’ sonically recreates the feeling of seconds-lasting-minutes that occurs just before an automobile crash, and serves as the 21st century answer to The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’. ‘Karma Police’ burrows deep inside the beauty of a world gone mad at itself. ‘Paranoid Android’ updates a British nursery rhyme, and sounds like the alienation that comes with too much technology and not enough time.

Thom Yorke sings throughout like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, his falsetto stretching a reedy, membrane-thin wall between sanity and madness. His vocals are generally buried beneath the murk and burble of electronic tape-loop noise and Jonny Greenwood’s itchy guitars. The compositions come off as a mad grafting of Kraftwerk and The Beatles, as the brilliance of the arrangements vie against the detached mood of the lyrics and music.

In the same way that Nirvana’s Nevermind changed music in the first half of the 1990′s, OK Computer had an instant and noticeable influence on the way albums were constructed – an influence that continues to the present. And somewhere far, far away, the aliens are extremely pleased…

Listen: The Tourist

Listen: Karma Police

Listen: Paranoid Android

Rainy Day Music

Bob Dylan famously claimed that “Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.” Growing up in Oregon, I learned to feel the rain, because it sure beat standing around just getting wet. That skill has come in handy over the last week, as the Bay Area has been mauled by a torrential rainstorm that dumped more than five inches on San Francisco in one 48-hour span.

Here are some songs that were inspired by those clouds in the sky, and serve as a good soundtrack for sitting and watching the raindrops roll down the windowpanes…

Listen: Buckets Of Rain [Bob Dylan]

Listen: Rainy Day, Dream Away [Jimi Hendrix]

Listen: Little Bit Of Rain [Fred Neil]

Listen: The Rain Song [Led Zeppelin]

Listen: Rain [Richard Betts]

Listen: Go Ahead In The Rain (Pimp Juice’s Players’ Paradise Remix) [A Tribe Called Quest]

Listen: Escape (Pina Colada Song) [Rupert Holmes]

Weekend Playlist

Here’s some of the music that passed over our turntable during the long, rainy weekend that was…

Santogold _ Santogold

Yeasayer _ All Hour Cymbals

New Order _ Brotherhood

Radiohead _ In Rainbows

My Morning Jacket _ Evil Urges

Primus _ Sailing The Seas Of Cheese

Dr. Feelgood _ Stupidity

Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble _ Texas Flood

Merl Saunders, Jerry Garcia, John Kahn, Bill Vitt _ Live At Keystone

Johnny Cash _ The Sun Years

The Long Ryders _ Native Sons

Skull Snaps _ Skull Snaps

Fred Locks _ Black Star Liner

Duke Ellington _ Blues In Orbit

Charles Mingus Sextet _ East Coasting

Blue Mitchell _ Blue’s Moods

The Chet Baker Quintet _ Groovin’ With The Chet Baker Quintet

Swingin’ With Cole

Perhaps the greatest American songwriter, Cole Porter was a musical force from the 1920′s until the mid-50′s, creating hundreds of tunes for both stage and screen, and indelibly lettering his style in the Great American Songbook. He never settled for an easy rhyme, and made music that was always witty, smart and sultry. In particular, his songs about relationships still resonate with the joys and frustrations of being madly in love. Many songwriters have tackled the topic of love, few have handled it so deftly and gracefully. “Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas do it,” he observes in ‘Let’s Do It’, and providing those fleas with their Phds is one of his typically wry touches. The ultimate tribute to Porter is that his music still sounds sophisticated, still speaks to the many conditions of love in the 21st century, and still gets played in the well-heeled clubs.

Listen: Let’s Do It [Ella Fitzgerald]

Listen: Night And Day [Frank Sinatra]

Listen: Ridin’ High [Peggy Lee]

Listen: Love For Sale [Bobby Darin]

Listen: It’s Delovely [Ella Fitzgerald]

*****

“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we’d all love one another.” – Frank Zappa