Sleeve Notes: Time Fades Away

The photo for the cover of the long lost Neil Young album Time Fades Away was taken by Joel Bernstein at the Philadelphia Spectrum on either January 26 or 27, 1973, during a three-month, 65-date tour of America. Bernstein provided the cover shots for a number of Young’s records, including After The Gold Rush, Rust Never Sleeps, and Weld, as well as albums by Bob Dylan (Live At Budokan), Tom Petty (Hard Promises), Joni Mitchell (Hejira) and many others. This particular album has long been out of print, because as Young has said, “The whole tour was a nervous experience.” But perhaps as well as any other photograph, Bernstein’s cover art captures the muggy anticipation of an audience waiting to be taken higher…

On The Fence: Live At Leeds

The Who’s 1970 concert album Live At Leeds has a lot of admirers and generally ranks pretty high on any best-of lists relating to live albums – a plaque outside the University Refectory at Leeds where the group played this show refers to it as “the most celebrated live album of its generation.” That may well be, but to my ears, this is a good-not-great record that has moments both sublime and snoozy. Which makes it a perfect candidate for a spot on the fence…

THUMBS UP: I’ve never been a huge Who fan, but even I recognize that Pete Townshend is a wicked guitarist and Keith Moon was one of the best drummers to beat the sticks. While neither are in top form throughout this set, ‘My Generation’ in particular benefits from the 14-minute live treatment presented here, and I applaud the overhaul they give the ‘Magic Bus’. The Who justified their reputation as one of the most exciting live acts of their day, and this album offers a few jolts of the energy they brought in concert. Several factors (noted below) make it something less than the greatest live album of all-time, but given the right set of expectations, this is an enjoyable document of a top-notch rock group very near their peak…

THUMBS DOWN: The LP release of Live At Leeds is such a vastly edited version of the true show it came from (represented on the two-disc Deluxe Edition of the album) that it really only hints at the ebb and flow of a real Who show. Their take of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ is wildly beloved, but it falters in places and feels sludgy in the extreme, while Johnny Kidd and The Pirates’ ‘Shake It All Over’ just gets mauled. And while Townshend and Moon generally deserve their props, lead singer Roger Daltry has only two gears and neither are exceptional. This is by no means a bad album, but for the quote-unquote greatest concert album of all-time, I expect more than a mixed bag of six songs. Call me crazy…

Album info:

Release date
16 May 1970

Producers
Jon Astley, Kit Lambert and The Who

Label
Decca Records

Side One
Young Man Blues
Substitute
Summertime Blues
Shakin’ All Over

Side Two
My Generation
Magic Bus

[Ear plugs or standing O - what's your take??]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Live At Topanga Corral/Live At Winterland

[Today: Into the boogie...]

Canned Heat took their name from Sterno, which desperate alcoholics would drink to chase a buzz during Prohibition. More specifically, they’re named for Tommy Johnson’s tune ‘Canned Heat Blues’, which bemoans that state of deadly drunkenness. But while Canned Heat were one of a stampede of psychedelic blues bands to pop up in the late 60′s, they sound less like a Tommy Johnson tribute band and more like a group of guys who sipped from a can of Sterno before heading onstage. Their blues are a gloriously ragged concoction that they called ‘Boogie Music’, but they were solid enough to back John Lee Hooker on his 1971 album Hooker ‘N Heat.

The same description that drove me away from them in college – ‘sloppy proto-hard rock’ or something of the like – would today have me hopping on the unicorn and flying over to the local record stores to find some of their LPs. Which I have, and I have to say that the best Canned Heat experience is the live experience. Their first four albums are up-and-down affairs that all feature a couple of must-have songs. Fronted by 300 pound lead singer Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite, it’s little wonder that Canned Heat was one of the groups that stole the show at Woodstock. Live At Topanga Corral finds them in an earlier incarnation (allegedly 1966/67, actually 1968) but still cooking up the boogie.

Jimi Hendrix also put on a pretty good set at Woodstock, although you’d be hard-pressed to find any Hendrix fan who would argue it was his finest performance. This fan thinks his best live moment might just be Live At Winterland, which was recorded October 10th-12th, 1968 at the esteemed San Francisco venue. As someone who has listened to dozens of different versions of Jimi playing ‘Red House’, I can confidently say that this is the hands-down definitive take. The same can be said of ‘Fire’ and ‘Manic Depression’, which both crackle with a spark that gives some hint of the charge that Hendrix provided in person.

Interestingly, it was the blazing virtuosity of Hendrix that helped bring me around to the boogie slop of Canned Heat. There is a strain of Hendrix bootleg that features him in the studio late at night, jamming on endless blues tunes that go nowhere and do nothing in the best possible way. That’s the spirit of Canned Heat – don’t expect too much, and you’ll get plenty…

Listen: Canned Heat Blues [Tommy Johnson]

Listen: Wish You Would [Canned Heat, Topanga]

Listen: Going Up The Country [Canned Heat, from Woodstock]

Listen: Red House [Jimi Hendrix]

Listen: Fire [Jimi Hendrix]

Buried Treasure: Cold Fact

[Today: Through the cracks...]

Drop the needle anywhere on Sixto Diaz Rodriguez’ 1970 debut, Cold Fact, and it’s confounding to figure out how this music didn’t get across to a wider audience – these are catchy, poetic slices of urban woe, set to an appealing folk strum. At the same time, it’s immediately obvious why these songs were doomed from the outset – they were simply too stark and angry for a crowd weaned on James Taylor and Carole King. Cold Fact was too folk for a rock audience, and too rock for a folk audience, and somewhere between the two it fell through a crack, all the way to South Africa.

The story of this album has almost taken on the quality of legend: after Cold Fact and its follow-up failed to make an impression, the remainders were crated up and put into storage in a warehouse in New York City. In 1976, several thousand copies were discovered and shipped to South Africa and Australia, where Rodriguez had earned a steady cult following. After a few shows in Australia in 1981, he slipped into a domestic life, raising a family and even running for public office. His popularity in South Africa increased to the point that he was able to headline a stadium tour of that country in 1998, but it was the inclusion of ‘Sugar Man’ on David Holmes’ 2002 compilation Come Get It I Got It that finally broke Rodriguez to the kind of appreciative audience he deserved all along.

Rodriguez functions as a latino Bob Dylan, using pointed wordplay to tell a story and get across some larger truths. But Dylan captured visions of kings and queens, and his Desolation Row was a mere abstraction, a literary device used to evoke feelings of doom. Rodriguez – a native of Detroit and the son of Mexican immigrants – was slinging his truth straight from the gutter, without varnish or sweetener. His reporting came from the boulevard of broken dreams and busted windows that ran right down the middle of Motown.

Album opener ‘Sugar Man’ is a haunting love song to “jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane”, an insidiously dreamy number that evokes drug impairment as well as any song this side of Lou Reed’s ‘Heroin’. ‘Establishment Blues’ (full title: ‘THIS IS NOT A SONG, IT’S AN OUTBURST: OR THE ESTABLISHMENT BLUES’) is an outburst – against bigoted cops, illegal handguns, garbage strikes, organized crime, divorce, cigarettes and a hundred other urban ills. Predictably, it’s an evergreen song that sounds more topical now than ever. ‘Inner City Blues’ is a stroll through real desolation and into the dark heart of Detroit, while ‘Jane S. Piddy’ follows an acid-head rebel loser as she disappears into the fog of San Francisco. ‘Hate Street Dialogue’, ‘Crucify Your Mind’, ‘Gommorah (A Nursery Rhyme)’ – the song titles paint a picture that isn’t pretty, but Rodriguez took the coffin dust and concrete hearts of his hometown and used them to paint his masterpiece…

Listen: Sugar Man

Listen: Establishment Blues

Listen: Inner City Blues

Masterpiece: Teaser And The Firecat

[Today: I'm going back...]

I’m a child again whenever I listen to Cat Stevens, and I can’t think of a higher compliment to any artist. His music takes me back to the 70s with a clarity that’s nearly unrivaled. From his un-ironic beard and shaggy Jesus ‘do to his dopey, lovable humanist philosophy, his whole person is redolent of another time and place. A time when Nerf basketball and whiffle ball were favorite pastimes and my friends and I were starting to learn about complicated stuff like girls getting their periods (mens-tray-shun?) and parents getting divorced. It was a time when many parents, teachers and relatives looked and acted like extras from Hair. I was a dumb, naive little kid, but even I caught a whiff of the rampant sex and drugs that were being enjoyed at that time. It made me wish I was older so I could partake in the fun too.

Along with screwing and snorting and Nerf sports, the 70s were also about positivity, environmentalism, feminism, and (because the of the 1976 US bi-centennial) patriotism. In a nutshell, it was a time of personal freedom, and the music of Cat Stevens was a ubiquitous presence. His Greatest Hits was as common as the slip-n-slides that dotted nearly every lawn on every block during those summers. His mellow, peaceful croon provided respite from a brigade of 70s heavy rockers, even as his songs seemed to speak an adult language full of complex subtleties that were still far beyond my Looney Tunes level of comprehension. But while his Greatest Hits might have been his most popular and best-selling album, his individual records are each macramé tapestries of their times.

His 1971 album Teaser And The Firecat set the tone for the entire decade that followed, and spinning it is the next best thing to catching a time machine back to the 70s. Top 10 hit ‘Peace Train’ radiates good vibrations, while ‘Moonshadow’ (reportedly Stevens’ favorite of his own songs) and ‘Morning Has Broken’ are respectively mysterious and majestic. But it’s the lesser-known songs that make this album such a delight – ‘The Wind’ evokes fleeting youth (and was used to great effect in Rushmore), ‘Tuesday’s Dead’ is a seize-the-moment anthem, and ‘Bitterblue’ is an autopsy of love gone wrong. These are songs of their times – turbulent, peaceful, free-spirited, indivisible, broken times…

Listen: Tuesday’s Dead

Listen: The Wind

Listen: Peace Train

Video Break: Fade Into You

Mazzy Star >> Fade Into You. This one’s for sultry tambourine…

Doubleshot Tuesday: Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun/Cop Shoot Cop…

[Today: Lost in space...]

Pink Floyd was a band I couldn’t get enough of during college. Long, spacey jams like ‘Echoes’, ‘Welcome To The Machine’ (parts 1-100) and ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ were staples of that era for me and my friends. The Floyd created the perfect soundtrack for the kind of jabber-til-dawn-about-the-world conversations we were engaged in. But listening to those songs now, none of them sound exactly like party music, particularly ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’.

This song might be chalked up as just another psychedelic nugget, except for the curious case of Syd Barrett, who once commanded the good ship Pink before consuming waaaay too much LSD, climbing in his spacecraft, and flying away, never again to return to earth. At any rate, ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ now sounds to me like a scary blues – one of Roger Waters’ first and best efforts at getting inside the mind of madness. It’s peaceful enough in there, what with a little marimba, but you’ll end up orbiting and orbiting, caught in a never-ending cycle of lunacy.

Speaking of cycles, Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce captures something of the insane, hypnotic death-spiral of heroin addiction in ‘Cop Shoot Cop…’, from the 1997 album Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space. Pierce’s epic, apocalyptic vision of addiction goes from a whispered lullaby that quotes John Prine’s stark smack song ‘Sam Stone’, into a squalling storm of guitar feedback that is finally joined by Mariachi horns, before settling back into the tranquil serenity of a high. It’s 16 minutes and 14 seconds of seductive hell, and Pierce sings throughout like a man on his last frayed nerve.

‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ and Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space both use outer space as a metaphor for the isolation chamber of drug abuse. For Pink Floyd the metaphor was used to denote a celestial traveler, out exploring the far reaches of the cosmos for the benefit of all. ‘Cop Shoot Cop…’ journeys from the Milky Way to grimy flophouses and back out to the stars again, but what you’re left with is a glimpse of the empty inner space of someone who is nodding off and drifting away. And the blues don’t get any blacker than that…

Listen: Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun [Pink Floyd]

Listen: Cop Shoot Cop… [Spiritualized]

Stuck In My Head: Heartbroken, In Disrepair

This goes out to my friends Lynn and Mary, who have each had to say a final goodbye to a loved one recently. It’s a helpless feeling to see those you care about marooned on an island of grief, but death is such a traumatic experience that I sometimes think it’s harder on the living than it is on the departed. While looking for words of wisdom to pass along on this topic, I came across an Eskimo proverb that casts death in a nice light:

Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.

Look to the stars, ladies, and know that you are loved…

Listen: Heartbroken, In Disrepair [Dan Auerbach]

Sleeve Notes: Oxygène

Jean Michel Jarre’s 1976 album was one of the seeds of electronica, and it was inspired by a painting by artist Michel Granger. Oxygène‘s retro-futuristic swirl of keyboards and electronic effects has been used by the likes of Jackie Chan, Carl Sagan and Grand Theft Auto. Granger’s painting/cover art sets the mood and lends Jarre’s music the dark undercurrent of the soundtrack to a documentary about future civilizations uncovering the havoc of humankind. And personally, this cover makes me wonder what exactly we’re drilling into when we go 20,000 leagues under the sea in search of oil…

[Special thanks to KB for passing this album my way...]

Buried Treasure: No Other

[Today: Lost and found...]

“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.” Friedrich Nietzsche had a clear belief in the role of destiny upon life, but for most of the rest of us, concepts like destiny, faith and the human soul excite questions that aren’t easily answered. Gene Clark clearly had a lot of big questions, and his 1974 album No Other is a beautiful exercise in metaphysical star-gazing.

Clark was a founding member of The Byrds, and functioned as that group’s main songwriter until his departure in early 1966. He worked on various solo projects and re-joined The Byrds a couple of times, but by the early 70s he was unsigned and seemed to be yesterday’s news. Singer/songwriter friendly label Asylum signed him on the strength of a 1972 Byrds reunion, no doubt hoping to land an earnest folkie in the vein of Joni Mitchell. What they got instead was mellow, philosophical country/folk rock infused with gospel and strings. Much to Asylum’s consternation, No Other ran $100,000 over budget and sounded like nothing on the radio at the time.

This album has been dogged by persistent rumors that its production was fueled by mountains of drugs (Mojo called it a “cocaine classic”), but it sounds like it was driven by nothing stronger than green tea and a good ocean view. Clark claimed as much, saying “The whole album was written when I had a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Northern California. I would just sit in the living room, which had a huge bay window, and stare at the ocean for hours at a time.” The title track and ‘Life’s Greatest Fool’ are just two examples of the near-religious experience offered by this music. Both songs seem imbued with the pure light of truth, even as they wonder at the nature of things.

In spite of many heavenly moments, No Other received scant promotion, peaked at #144 on the charts, and was out of print by 1976. Puzzled by the album’s abject failure, Clark never really regained his artistic footing, and spent his remaining years soured by the poor reception of his magnum opus. But No Other represents an interesting intersection of art and life – it’s an album about destiny, but it’s also an album of destiny. While it wasn’t enthusiastically embraced upon release, it has slowly gained a now unshakeable reputation as a lost masterpiece. Destiny’s darling.

Listen: Life’s Greatest Fool

Listen: No Other

Listen: Silver Raven