Video Break: You Got Lucky

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers >> You Got Lucky. This one’s for luck…

Sleeve Notes: Pyromania

Nothing dates me faster than a conversation about video games. The P and I have a Wii that we use here and there, and I spent an obscene amount of time playing Sega hockey in the mid-90s, but the height of my video game fixation came in the early 80s, with the Atari 2600. Pitfall, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Missile Command, Joust – these were the things that my summer days were made of in 1983. And the most awesome soundtrack for whiling away perfectly sunny afternoons indoors, killing things on a video screen, was without a doubt Pyromania. The cartoon explosion on the cover only added graphic emphasis to the grim job of slaughtering aliens and protecting mother earth. This album is a hard rock classic, but it doesn’t sound the same without the blips and beeps and audio carnage of a day well spent…

Listen: Rock Of Ages

Buried Treasure: Cactus

[Today: Big dumb blues...]

The official website for the band Cactus bills them as “the world’s first supergroup”, but it’s a title that withstands the harsh reality of math about as well as the Oakland Raiders’ claim to be “the winningest franchise in professional sports.” The original supergroup – Cream – broke up a full two years before Cactus formed from the pieces of Vanilla Fudge (rhythm section), the Amboy Dukes (lead singer) and Mitch Ryder’s Detroit Wheels (guitar). Cactus might not have been the first supergroup, but their version of blues/rock sounds much more modern than the “pure” blues of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers or the blues-based psychedelic noodling of Cream.

Drummer Carmine Appice and bassist Tim Bogert disbanded Vanilla Fudge in 1970, at the height of its popularity, in favor of the opportunity to start a band with guitarist Jeff Beck and singer Rod Stewart. But when Beck was injured in a car accident and Stewart pulled out of the project to join The Faces, Appice and Bogert suddenly found themselves without a group. Enter guitarist Jim McCarty of Mitch Ryder’s Detroit Wheels and singer Rusty Day from the Amboy Dukes. Cactus was called “the American Led Zeppelin” and the points of comparison are obvious: they bludgeoned the blues behind pulverizing drums, loud, distorted guitar and a wailing lead singer. Of course, Appice, McCarty and Day were no Bonham, Page and Plant, and their version of the blues was even more simple and brutal than the variety that Led Zep was peddling.

Album opener ‘Parchman Farm’ is an aggressive, ill-tempered take on Mose Allison’s blues standard, while ‘You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover’ is a turbo-charged update of a Willie Dixon tune. The rest of Cactus features original songs, highlighted by the mellow sweetness of ‘My Lady From South Of Detroit’, the last rites of ‘Bro. Bill’, the molten fuzz of ‘Oleo’ and the humid sexual aggression of ‘Let Me Swim’. This isn’t the kind of album that will cause you to lose any sleep or brain cells interpreting lyrics, but it’s a critical midpoint in the development of hard rock. The blues-based bands of the mid-60s eventually mutated into the hard and heavy sound of the 70s, and like the Black Sabbaths and AC/DCs that altered that landscape, Cactus was more sledgehammer than diving rod.

Listen: Parchman Farm

Listen: Let Me Swim

Listen: Bro. Bill

Masterpiece: Howlin’ Wolf

[Today: The Wolf struts...]

Everything about Howlin’ Wolf’s musical persona leads to one word: ferocious. The man stood six and a half feet tall, tipped the scales at 300 pounds, and projected a personality even bigger than that. His voice a violent rasp, Wolf’s music is all menacing swagger, without an ounce of the surrender or sorrow that typically tints the blues. The songs he made famous – including ‘Smokestack Lightning’, ‘Wang-Dang-Doodle’ and ‘Back Door Man’ – provided a bedrock foundation for the British Invasion musicians of the mid-60s, most notably The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton-vintage Yardbirds. But shades of Wolf’s gravel voice and unhinged performance have also been echoed by offbeat artists like Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits.

In Howlin’ Wolf’s massive hands, a song like ‘Goin Down Slow’ mutates from a pitiful blues into a leering ode to oral sex. ‘Spoonful’ is either a hyper-confident love song or gleeful celebration of drug use. ‘Back Door Man’ is built on sexual bravado that’s still shocking, even 50 years later. ‘Wang-Dang-Doodle’, ‘The Red Rooster’, ‘Shake For Me’ – Howlin’ Wolf’s self-titled 1962 album (also widely known as The Rocking Chair Album for its cover shot) is filled to the brim with sexual metaphors. While young Keith Richards was aping Chuck Berry, a young Mick Jagger was no doubt paying attention to the preening antics of the man who described himself as “300 pounds of joy.”

But Wolf’s offstage personality belied his wild stage presence. Born Chester Arthur Burnett, he was named after the 21st president of the United States, and generally carried himself with a studied reserve that’s totally absent from his music. A dedicated husband and father, Wolf didn’t abuse drugs or alchohol, and conducted his business with enough acumen that he was one of the few bluesmen to get rich off his music. Illiterate into his 40′s, Wolf nonetheless took classes on the side that were aimed at improving his business sense. His profitability ensured that he was able to play with his pick of musicians throughout his career, but one near constant in his band was razor-sharp guitarist Hubert Sumlin. Willie Dixon played bass and wrote many of the songs in Wolf’s repertoire. Wolf himself blew a mean harmonica, when he wasn’t singing like a beast unleashed.

Sounding more patriotic than primal, he once said “Ain’t no better place than the US. This is a free enterprise system. You can get whatever you want in the US.” All that wanting and all that getting is packed into Howlin’ Wolf’s music…

Listen: Goin’ Down Slow

Listen: Spoonful

Listen: Back Door Man

Listen: Wang Dang Doodle

Doubleshot Tuesday: Full Moon Fever/Harvest Moon

[Today: Full moon fever...]

Full moon tonight. Lots of green cheese hanging in the sky…

Listen: Harvest Moon [Neil Young]

Listen: Bark At The Moon [Ozzy Osbourne]

Listen: Moonlight Drive [The Doors]

Listen: Dancing In The Moonlight [Thin Lizzy]

Listen: Kiko And The Lavender Moon [Los Lobos]

Listen: You’ve Got The Moon [Josh Ritter]

Listen: Fly Me To The Moon (Live) [Frank Sinatra]

Listen: Moon Dreams [Miles Davis]

Listen: Drunk On The Moon [Tom Waits]

Listen: Sugar Moon [Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys]

Listen: What A Little Moonlight Can Do [Billie Holiday]

Listen: Pink Moon [Nick Drake]

Listen: Moonshot [Joe Maphis]

Listen: Moonrise [Sean Hayes]

Listen: Big Sur Moon [Buckethead]

Weekend Playlist

“Our steak and martinis is draft beer with weenies.”
~ George Jones

Various Artists | Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound Of The Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-79

Electric Six | Fire

Donovan | Barabajagal

David Crosby | If I Could Only Remember My Name

Blind Faith | Blind Faith

Jack Johnson | Brushfire Fairytales

The Rolling Stones | Exile On Main St.

Madeleine Peyroux | Half The Perfect World

Calexico | Hot Rail

The Byrds | Sanctuary IV

Creedence Clearwater Revival | Green River

Grateful Dead | Workingman’s Dead

Flatt & Scruggs | The Mercury Sessions, Volume 1

Dwight Yoakam | Guitars Cadillacs Etc. Etc.

Charlie Rich | Behind Closed Doors

Uncle Dave Macon | Go Long Mule

Ernest Tubb | Ernest Tubb’s Greatest Hits

Dierks Bentley | Modern Day Drifter

George Jones | George Jones’ Greatest Hits
[Album cover not pictured]

Kings Of Leon | Aha Shake Heartbreak

Patsy Cline | The Patsy Cline Story

Sleeve Notes: Who Are You

The chair was flipped around to hide his paunch, but the message – NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY – couldn’t have been any more prophetic. Keith Moon would be dead within three weeks of the August 1978 release of this album, his life a monument to excess. He popped the most pills, drank the best brandy, told the funniest jokes, pulled off the biggest pranks, trashed the most hotel rooms, and played drums like a manic, grinning octopus. I’m not a big Who fan, but even I get chills from Moon’s drum fills and rolls. He recreated the sea on Quadrophenia, blistered the kit on Who’s Next, and punctuated Tommy. The music and the legend, those can’t be taken away…

Masterpiece: Songs For The Deaf

[Today: Into the desert...]

“I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.” ~ David Byrne

“Radio is so fragmented, it’s unbelievable.” ~ Bob Seger

“Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned, frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?” ~ Billy Joel

Once upon a time, radio was a kingmaker – the single biggest factor in breaking new bands to the masses. DJs like Alan Freed, Dick Clark, Wolfman Jack, John Peel and Casey Kasem were gatekeepers of rock and roll, and people looked to them for musical guidance. But the collective experience of hearing a hit song on the radio is now a thing of the past, undone by MTV, MP3s, corporate shenanigans, and a hundred other extenuating circumstances. Except, of course, in Los Angeles, where driving isn’t optional, and hundreds of miles of freeways lay pointing in every direction. It’s no accident that L.A. boasts some of the best radio stations in the country – the layout of the city practically demands it.

Queens Of The Stone Age’s third LP, 2002′s Songs For The Deaf, tracks the 120-mile journey from Hollywood to the desert in Joshua Tree, and the album’s 14 songs are stitched together by fake radio station IDs and made-up DJ banter from places like Banning and Chino Hills. It’s a drive that QOTSA frontman and lead guitarist Josh Homme has made many times. “When I’d do it I didn’t have a stereo, all I had was a radio,” he recalled in a 2002 interview. “And it goes into weird religious stations and really bad, bad music on that trip through the middle of nowhere. So I used to really enjoy the silence and then every once in a while the station you were at would all of a sudden let out a screech and become a new station. I just wanted to bring that to a record somehow.”

He brought it to record in typical QOTSA fashion – with a rotating cast of musicians that included Dean Ween of Ween and Chris Goss of Masters Of Reality. Dave Grohl put Foo Fighters on hiatus for most of 2002 so that he could play drums on this album and the subsequent tour, and Mark Lanegan makes an excellent guest vocal appearance on ‘Hanging Tree’. QOTSA had released two well-received albums before this, but Songs For The Deaf was their breakthrough, going Top 10 on three different continents. Songs like ‘No One Knows’ and ‘Another Love Song’ are the kind of catchy hard rock that hasn’t been heard on the radio in decades. “I need a saga, what’s the saga? It’s Songs For The Deaf – you can’t even hear it,” whines a DJ to open the album. With this saga, Queens Of The Stone Age mock what AM/FM has become, while creating an alternate universe where I still can’t live without my radio…

Listen: Another Love Song

Listen: Hanging Tree

Listen: No One Knows

Buried Treasure: Sunrise On The Sufferbus

[Today: A newfangled power trio...]

Masters Of Reality started out as a Black Sabbath-inspired, novelty Halloween band in the early 80s before evolving into a more polished hard rock unit. The band rotated through several lineups, with frontman/guitarist Chris Goss being the lone connecting thread, before Goss and bassist Googe hooked up with ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker in the early 90s. “My wife convinced me to do this jam,” said Baker. “I didn’t want to do it at all. And afterwards, l was totally amazed, especially with Chris.” For his part, Goss remembers “We met at a barbecue. The suggestion of a jam session happened, and l thought, ‘Great drummer. This’ll be a cool jam.’ We played for six or seven hours. After that, l think we all knew. We were smiling from ear-to-ear. Ginger understood – it was happening stuff.”

Their 1992 album, Sunrise On The Sufferbus, is most definitely happening stuff. Baker’s drumming is up front and superb throughout – he’s both crisp and hard rock solid, and proves that even if his best-selling days were behind him, his best drumming definitely wasn’t. Goss’ vocal style anticipates Josh Homme’s singing with Queens Of The Stone Age, and in fact Goss has been involved in the production of both Kyuss and QOTSA albums, and has been part of the ‘desert scene’ that has sprung up around Homme. It would seem that Masters Of Reality were about a half dozen years ahead of their potential audience.

This band was also much more eclectic in style than the grunge bands that were flying high in ’92. In places, the slow grind of bass and drum here is reminiscent of Soundgarden, but this album includes sweet almost-pop tunes (‘Rolling Green’ and ‘Jody Sings’), narcotic hard rockers (‘Ants In The Kitchen’ and ‘Rabbit One’), straight up rock and roll (‘She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On)’ and ‘Tilt-A-Whirl’) and one great oddity (‘T.U.S.A.’) that features Baker talking about Americans’ inability to make a decent cup of tea, over a martial drum beat and Goss’ steaming guitar licks.

Because it wasn’t anchored to the musical styles of its day, Sunrise On The Sufferbus still sounds fresh and surprisingly new, like a long unopened package containing something you didn’t even know you wanted…

Listen: Rabbit One

Listen: She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On)

Listen: T.U.S.A.

Listen: Jody Sings

Listen: Rolling Green

Listen: Ants In The Kitchen

Stuck In My Head: I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You

New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner died last week, and like many famously unsavory people, his obituaries read like statements for the defense. Sure he could be an overbearing jerk, but… and so on. We were treated to many stories about secret philanthropic gestures and humanizing tales of a rocky relationship with a perfectionist father that drove him beyond reason to win.

But I don’t think those well-intentioned obits did The Boss any favors. The Yankees are the Evil Empire of baseball, and Steinbrenner was their Darth Vadar. It was a role he relished and played well, and his darkest impulses are what made him such a compelling American. He built baseball dynasties through force of will and hundreds of millions in annual payroll, and he blasted through employees like the proverbial bull in a china shop. “I will never have a heart attack. I give them,” he once said, in full Vadar mode. But ironically, it was a heart attack that ended his life.

It’s tempting to wonder if The Boss had a “Rosebud” moment near the end of his life, when he realized that winning isn’t everything, and baseball is just a game. But I hope not, and I doubt it. The best movies have great, icy-hearted villains, and the during the Steinbrenner era, the Yankees were one of the most entertaining shows in sports…

Listen: I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You [The Alan Parsons Project]