Bad Apple: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band OST

[Today: The accidental parody...]

“Disaster” is a word that should be reserved for the Hindenbergs and Titanics of the world – actual life-consuming accidents of epic proportions. To my knowledge, nobody was killed during the making of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Original Soundtrack, which is rather a shame. The movie that spawned this album is laughably bad – a musical featuring the songs of The Beatles and starring Peter Frampton as Billy Shears and The Bee Gees as The Lonely Hearts Club Band, with cameos from Steve Martin (Dr. Maxwell Edison), George Burns (Mr. Kite), Alice Cooper (Father Sun), and dozens more who wish they’d just said no.

Amazingly, Martin’s leering, jackass take on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, Burns’ pathetic ‘Fixing A Hole’ and Cooper’s confusing duet with the Bee Gees on ‘Because’ don’t come close to qualifying for Worst Moment status. That’s reserved for everything featuring Paul Nicholas and Diane Steinberg, who sing with over-emotive, off-off-Broadway voices that radiate fake good cheer and turn songs like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ – great songs, let me remind you – into accidental parodies of The Beatles.

There are a few good moments here – Aerosmith’s ‘Come Together’ is perfectly wicked, Earth Wind & Fire’s ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ is a top-shelf Beatles cover, and Billy Preston’s ‘Get Back’ is a worthy, funkified rival to the original. There are even a few unintentionally hilarious moments that work – Donald Pleasance does a weird rap in the middle of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ that almost redeems the number, and my LP copy skips during Frankie Howard’s acrid ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, so that the phrase “dirty old man” plays over and over. But truly, there are so many misguided, careless covers on this album that pointing out its bright spots is akin to saying that, while it did turn into gaseous fireball, The Hindenburg provided some killer views.

This project was produced and bankrolled by Robert Stigwood, who was coming off back-to-back blockbusters with Saturday Night Fever and Grease. And on the strength of massive, expensive hype, this double LP actually went double platinum, which is one reason it can be found in every dollar bin in America today. But buyer beware – Sgt. Pepper’s… OST is more travesty than tribute – the musical equivalent of repainting Picasso’s masterpieces using only cow dung and glitter.

Bad Apple: Trout Mask Replica

[Today: Hair pie and heavy art...]

Part of me wants to write the phrase ‘hair pie’ 175 times and call it a review of Trout Mast Replica. That’s roughly how obnoxious, juvenile and incomprehensible I find this album. I’m no Captain Beefheart hater – Safe As Milk is one of the best rock debuts of all-time, and his early 70’s albums Clear Spot and The Spotlight Kid are solid, debauched psychedelic blues. But Trout Mask Replica is a whole different ball of wax – a double album of intentionally nerve-rattling train wrecks that barely bother to parade as songs.

By its very nature, avant-garde art isn’t meant to be enjoyed by everyone. I don’t begrudge the Cap’n his art, I just don’t get it, and I don’t think it stands up well within the parameters of quote/unquote music. The fact that I’m dropping the needle on this mess – the fact that once upon a time I paid $6.95 for this LP – it all makes me very grouchy. Five seconds into album opener ‘Frownland’ is enough to make any rational person want to yank the needle and grab a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of booze. It’s like watching a foreign movie without the subtitles – I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on, and the characters are starting to annoy me.

It always amuses me when critics ooh and ahh over the fact that Beefheart and the Magic Band had to hole up in the desert and rehearse for months on end in order to sound this shitty. That Trout Mask Replica is taken seriously as music is part and parcel of a gullible generation of 60’s-centric fans and critics who believe that if it was made in the 60’s, it must have some redeeming value, even if it makes your ears bleed. And make no mistake, this album isn’t music so much as a slasher movie on vinyl – Cap’n Beefheart and the boys kill their instruments and murder a bunch of comically bad songs. ‘Moonlight On Vermont’ is most decidedly NOT the much-covered standard – rather it sounds like a cat in a blender. ‘Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish’ comes off like the rantings of a deranged idiot. And ‘Pachuco Cadaver’ opens with this lame-brained bit of dialogue: “A squid eating dough in a poly-ethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?”

No Cap’n, I’m sorry, but I don’t got you…

Bad Apple: Self-Portrait

[Today: Dylan's stink bomb...]

Here’s a comment I recently left on the blog The Rising Storm, in response to their U-Review on Bob Dylan’s album Self Portrait:

“In a word, horrible. Dylan has made about 185 albums, so there’s no need to ever, ever go here. The only tune on this album that’s even remotely of value – ‘All The Tired Horses’ – features a chorus of backup singers on vocals instead of Dylan. Everything else amounts to a big, steaming pile of horse poop.”

- dk June 8, 2009 @ 12:50 pm

*****

Here’s a follow-up comment by another reader of the same blog:

“The only real problems with Dylan’s most misunderstood and unheard album were the timing and the title. Were it released as The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 in 2009, it might not have dismayed critics and confused most of the rest of his audience. Dylan has long claimed it was his response to unauthorized, bootleg recordings, and that description fits — from the scattershot sequencing to the wildly eclectic repertoire. Given the current Dylan penchant for unpredictable covers in his live show, mixing up country ballads, folk standards and contemporary favorites and a sprinkling of his own songs seems downright rootsy. I’ve always loved this record, but most interesting is that except for the country crooner’s voice, Self-Portrait isn’t much different from his onstage act today. Be honest: When was the last time you listened to it? Or did you ever? What goes around comes around. Self-Portrait takes us full circle.”

- L.R. June 20, 2009 @ 7:28 pm

*****

And here’s my rebuttal, which gets to the heart of my feelings about Self-Portrait:

With apologies to Mr. R, I have to say that my opinion of Self Portrait relates to the music, not the title of the album or when and how it was marketed. His assertion that this album wouldn’t have confused Dylan’s audience as much if it had been released in 2009 as part of the Bootleg Series totally misses the point. The very intention of this album was to confuse and dismay his audience. Noted Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin wrote that “According to Dylan, the sense of a man parodying himself on his first album of 1970, Self Portrait, was a deliberate, concerted attempt to dispel much of the iconography surrounding him, once and for all.”

Zimmy: “That album was put out… [because] at that time… I didn’t like the attention I was getting. I [had] never been a person that wanted attention. And at that time I was getting the wrong kind of attention, for doing things I’d never done. So we released that album to get people off my back. They would not like me anymore. That’s… the reason that album was put out, so people would just stop buying my records, and they did.” [1981]

I had listened to this album passively at some point in the last year, but I just pulled it off the shelf and I’m spinning it right now. While I don’t think it bears much relation to his current live act – his band today is ultra-tight, and much of Self-Portrait feels hackneyed and tossed off – there’s more to recommend here than I had remembered. ‘Alberta #1′ isn’t bad, and in fact most of side one is pretty passable. But side two is where things start to fall apart, and this album gets progressively worse. ‘Belle Isle’ is an abomination – I hereby nominate it as the single worst piece of crap that Dylan has ever foisted on his fans. Most of side two sounds like outtakes from Nashville Skyline that were better off on the cutting room floor.

But it’s Dylan’s ‘covers’ of his own material that really induce shudders. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is amateurish, badly recorded, and hard to swallow. The version of ‘Mighty Quinn’ included here sounds like an after-hours bar jam with too many musicians on stage. And his take on Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer’ sounds drunk and rambling – a musical insult to both Paul Simon and himself. When critics called this album a middle finger to Dylan’s fans, these were the songs they were reacting to.

I don’t actually think Dylan was trying to juke his audience as much as he might have us believe – that’s revisionist history to preserve his nearly unblemished artistic record. I think that he was searching for his next, post-Nashville sound (and if I were feeling charitable, I might even say that he was going for some sloppy pre-punk version of himself) but he didn’t find it, struck out miserably, and then finally did regain his stride with the confessional Blood On The Tracks.

Personally, I don’t like Self Portrait, but I admire Bob Dylan for having the courage to take chances and follow his convictions. Some of his [music] leads down dead end alleys, but he’s taken me to enough cool places that I’ll follow the guy practically anywhere…

- dk June 21, 2009 @ 1:23 am

Bad Apple: Hotel California

[Today: The Eagles give me heartburn...]

When I eventually reach Hell, I have no doubt that The Eagles and Jimmy Buffett will be playing on a continuous loop that’s piped loud and clear to the farthest reaches of the netherworld by Satan’s state-of-the-art audio system. These über-groovy, smooth-n-easy dreck merchants make me want to do unspeakable things to my eardrums, but it wasn’t always so. When I was a kid, my folks had some Eagles LPs kicking around their record collection(s), and while I didn’t go there often, they certainly didn’t drive me to distraction. But somewhere in the course of growing up, I’ve developed an almost irrational, Tom Vs. Jerry loathing for this music. Of course, I prefer to think of it as “taste”.

Hotel California – one of the ten best-selling albums of all-time, no less – receives the focus of my ire here, but as far as I’m concerned, every one of their albums suck the proverbial donkey. I admire what Joe Walsh stands for artistically – his solo albums and work with The James Gang is uniformly excellent – but his involvement with this group is a stain on his legacy that I just can’t square away. Say it ain’t so Joe! If joining up with these jokers was a ploy to pad his bank account, then I’ll stand and applaud, but otherwise I just have to scratch my head and wonder why.

But what’s not to like about the Eagles? you might ask (others certainly have). Let me flip that around and ask – what’s to like about this band? They took the groundbreaking, back-to-the-country sound of The Band and Gram Parsons, and watered it down until it was fit for FM radio. Nothing about their music is remotely exciting, and most of it is entirely predictable. I’d call them the Lawrence Welk of Country Rock, but I actually hold a fond place in my heart for Mr. Welk (one of my grandma’s favorites) and wouldn’t want to degrade his memory in such a manner. The songs themselves might be catchy enough, but they add up to nothing. Listening to an Eagles album is the equivalent of eating a big bag of Funyuns for dinner – the first few bites might go down fine, but you’ll end up feeling sick to your stomach and regretting a poor decision. And like the Monosodium Glutamate in potato chips, the smoove studio sounds of an album like Hotel California only disguises its bland, nutrient-free core.

After nearly three years of writing in this space, this review marks a first for this blog – I’m breaking one of my cardinal rules and writing about an album I don’t own. I can’t and won’t include this LP in my collection. It couldn’t be any other way – if I did own Hotel California I’d just end up breaking it over my knee while cackling like a maniac. On second thought…

Bad Apple: 9012Live – The Solos

[Today: Yes play with themselves...]

Oh the bombast! The number of good live albums in print is eclipsed by the mountains of bad live albums that have been foisted on dunder-headed rock fans over the years. Live albums as a breed are ripe for the kind of stuff you don’t want to hear on the hi-fi – plodding solos, inane stage banter, screaming teenagers, and the like. After exhaustive and quite painful research, I’ve concluded that the single worst live album of all-time is 9012Live – The Solos, a 1985 release by prog wankers Yes.

Worse than Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends… Ladies And Gentlemen, Emerson Lake And Palmer you ask (wheezing for breath)? By a nose. Worse than Extremely Live by Vanilla Ice? It was close. Grand Funk Railroad has a live album that smells like a three-month old sardine, and even that couldn’t touch 9012Live – The Solos. Taken from their 1984 tour behind the surprise comeback hit album 90125, this set thumbs its nose at casual fans by ignoring the two hits from that album, ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’ and ‘Leave It’. It also has the bonus distinction of being repulsive to even the group’s most ardent fans, because it features just one tune from their 70’s heyday.

As the album title promises, each song here features an extended solo from one of the band members – and Yes had members who LOVED them some solos. Trevor Rabin’s guitar solo on ‘Solly’s Beard’ is probably the “best” thing here, because it’s also the most forgettable. Jon Anderson’s a capella rendering of ‘Soon’ is a touching reminder of why I don’t care for classic Yes. But the proverbial cake is taken by Chris Squire, who turns in a shredded version of ‘Amazing Grace’ that sounds like his misguided homage to Jimi Hendrix’ ‘Star Spangled Banner’. If you’re looking to ruin a song, at least have the decency to stick to your own.

So if you’re scoring at home, this is an album of filler tracks, featuring wanky solos from a band that was ten years past a prime that most people loathed to begin with. This is truly an album for nobody. ProgArchives.com got it half right in observing that “As far as Yes lovers [are concerned]… most of them would hate this live album.” You don’t have to love Yes to hate this album.

Bad Apple: LIE – The Love And Terror Cult

[Today: Charlie Manson sucks the big one...]

Before he became one of the most notorious serial killers of the 20th century, Charles Manson fancied himself a singer/songwriter. He was a known quantity in the L.A. music scene of the late-60’s, and was friendly with a number of musicians, including Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and Neil Young. But in spite of his famous friends, Manson and his family were so erratic and scary that he was unable to land a recording contract. A version of his song ‘Cease To Exist’ was actually included on the Beach Boys’ album 20/20, under the confusing title ‘Never Learn Not To Love’. Some sources believe that Manson undertook his killing spree out of frustration at not being able to break into the music business.

Prior to his sensational infamy, Manson’s musical recordings were unreleased non-starters. But once the media spotlight found him, it was only a matter of time until his songs were snuck out in an effort to cash in on his ill-gotten notoriety. The music on LIE – The Love And Terror Cult was recorded on September 11, 1967 but didn’t see release until 1970. In 2004, Mojo magazine included the album among its “67 Lost Albums You Must Own” – a tragic lapse in judgement from an otherwise outstanding publication.

There are two reasons this album should not be a part of your collection. The first, obviously, is that Manson was a blood-thirsty psycho who was responsible for the murders of seven people. For that reason alone, even if this sounded like the second-coming of Neil Young (and it doesn’t), you’d feel dirty owning it (trust me). But, just for the sake of giggles, let’s assume you can overlook his checkered past, and you’re only interested in the music. Well, the music just plain sucks. Manson’s lack of musical talent is painfully obvious in every track included on this album. His scattershot approach to the recording studio ensured that even if he were a gifted singer, his music would still have been unlistenable. As he himself admitted: “I never really dug recording, you know, all those things pointing at you. You get into the studio, and it’s hard to sing into micro-phones. My relationship to music is completely subliminal, it just flows through me.”

The “music” that flowed through Charles Manson doesn’t sound evil or menacing – it’s just plain boring. I’m ambivalent about the death penalty, but I’d be happy enough to see Manson die a slow, painful death. The man just doesn’t deserve to still be drawing oxygen. And that goes double for the greedy bastard who decided to release this music, which sounds like garbage and smells like blood.

Listen: Cease To Exist

Listen: Look At Your Game Girl

Bad Apple: Knee Deep In The Hoopla

[Today: A musical endurance test...]

Starship’s Knee Deep In The Hoopla is the Pet Sounds or What’s Going On of lousy albums – it may not top anyone’s list of the worst records ever released, but it has to be in every top ten compiled on the subject. Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship in the early 70’s, and then turned into Starship when founder Paul Kantner left the group in the mid-80’s. Starship played a synth-heavy brand of pop schlock that featured watered-down melodies and clichéd lyrics, and except for Grace Slick (more on her later) it had no relation to the earlier versions of the band.

Lead single ‘We Built This City’ is so bad, so diabolically reminiscent of crappy 80’s FM radio, that it’s almost salmonella-inducing. It’s easily the worst song ever written about San Francisco, but because this is the 80’s we’re talking about, it of course became the first song by any version of this band to go to #1. The self-congratulatory lyrics would be hard to swallow coming from the Airplane, but from Starship this qualifies as almost psychotic self-aggrandizement. Really Starship, you think San Francisco was built on your weak synthesizer hooks and Grace Slick’s tuneless shriek? Rarely does music anger me to the point of violence, but… well, just watch yourself around me for the rest of the day.

Predictably, Knee Deep… is a wall-to-wall mess that qualifies as a musical endurance test at only 41 minutes running time. The album’s other #1 hit (of course) is the treacly ballad ‘Sara’ – a song who’s mere mention has undoubtedly lost me dozens of readers permanently. I wish I could say that tracks like ‘Hearts Of The World (Will Understand)’ and ‘Love Rusts’ are hidden gems that help balance out this album. But I can’t say that. Starship is knee-deep in something here, but what they’re calling hoopla sounds and smells a lot like horsie poop to me.

Listen: We Built This City

Bad Apple: Let’s Get Lost

[Today: The ghost of Chet Baker...]

In general I’m a big fan of Chet Baker’s music. Most everything he made before 1970 is worth a spin, and although his stuff with strings is a little trying, his recordings with Gerry Mulligan rank as some of the greatest music ever preserved on tape. But by 1987, when much of this music was recorded, he was spent both musically and physically. Listening to these songs is a grueling experience for anyone, but particularly for a Baker fan who knows what he sounded like in the 50’s and 60’s and can weigh how much his skills had deteriorated in the intervening decades.

Chet Baker Sings And Plays From The Film “Let’s Get Lost” is a selection of songs from a 1989 documentary that follows Baker during the last years of his life and juxtaposes that footage with images of his younger self. Baker was a longtime heroin addict, and by the 1980’s his personal habits had taken an obvious toll on his music and appearance – by the time these songs were recorded, he looked ravaged by time, and could barely carry a tune. ‘Moon & Sand (Motivo di Raggi di Luna)’ is a slurred mess, ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ sounds like an inebriated and unskilled Chet Baker impersonator (although his trumpet work on this song is the highlight of the album), and the rest veers between sloppy and sleepy.

I’ve not seen the accompanying documentary, so perhaps I’m missing the visual context that gives this music its purpose. Director Bruce Weber was responsible for all the iconic black and white 50’s photos of Baker that have helped shape his pretty-boy jazz legend. Weber was reportedly interested in contrasting the young, handsome Baker with the scarred mess that he’d become. Cinematically that’s all well and good, but musically it’s a big fat downer. Baker’s horn doesn’t sound bad, but his voice – not great to begin with – is beyond shot, and unfortunately he sings on almost every song here. And while tracks like ‘Blame It On My Youth’ have a certain poignancy that would serve as excellent anti-drug messages, I can’t imagine Let’s Get Lost is anybody’s idea of a good time.

Bad Apple: Girl You Know It’s True

[Today: The unique artistry of Milli Vanilli...]

Milli Vanilli has entered the American vernacular as shorthand for a faker, a dupe, a con artist – which is perhaps a greater achievement than many of their late-80’s musical brethren can claim. Hey, Milli Vanilli means something – it might not be positive, but the idea of this band persists, particularly in major league baseball, where every team seems to field a few steroid cheats who are the athletic equivalent of Milli Vanilli (Sammy Sosa anyone?). By not even providing the vocals for their own album, they were natural godfathers to the current mob of untalented hacks using ProTools and AutoTune to sound like they can sing. In many ways, Milli Vanilli were ahead of the curve – if they were to appear on the scene today, it would be mere weeks before they enjoyed their own reality TV series (in fact, they were featured on the very first episode of VH1’s Behind The Music).

The group’s debut, Girl You Know It’s True contained enough shitty synth-pop that, naturally, it produced three #1 hits, sold 10 million copies, and won them the best new artist Grammy for 1990. But Fab and Rob (the lads on the cover) didn’t panic, they simply held press conferences even though they couldn’t speak a word of english without thick German accents. Even as a dopey 20 year old, I remember hearing these guys talk and having a WTF!? moment, wondering how they were singing the smooth R&B that was all over the radio and MTV. It was like hearing Arnold Schwarzenegger accept an award on behalf of Teddy Pendergrass. From there a few well-placed questions cut through the tissue of lies behind this album, they were exposed as frauds, the Grammy was returned, and they were effectively ruined.

Their story took a dark turn in 1998, when Rob was found dead in a Frankfurt hotel room from an overdose combo of alcohol and pills. His death was ruled an accident, but he’d attempted suicide before, and it’s hard to see that attempt not being related to his former group’s spectacular and very public flameout. His ex-bandmate, Fab Morvan, explained on his MySpace page that “…we were just a couple of kids who were unsure about how we could achieve our dreams, but once we found the way to do it… the rest, as they say, is history. Our album, Girl You Know It’s True, sold more than 14 million copies around the world and we were all over MTV.”

Universal Pictures currently has a Milli Vanilli biopic in development. Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson told Variety that “I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of fakes and frauds, and in this case, you had guys who pulled off the ultimate con, selling 30 million singles and 11 million albums and then becoming the biggest laughing-stocks of pop entertainment.” I for one look forward to this upcoming cinematic triumph, for it will expose Milli Vanilli for a second time – not as cheats and hacks, but as savvy hustlers who figured out that the star maker machinery runs on lies, guts, and style, long before that became obvious to the rest of us.

Bad Apple: Metal Machine Music

[Today: I listen to the bad albums, so you don't have to...]

Metal Machine Music hurts, for real. This is one of the few albums in the history of rock that comes with a prominently displayed psychological/medical warning. It seems that prolonged exposure to this “music” can permanently damage your hearing and/or your psyche. But what else could be expected from an album recorded with no musicians, just guitars and amps set to feed back off one another? This isn’t just an LP, it’s a weapon in the war on terror. It’s the kind of album that can make one feel genuine remorse for having fully functioning ears.

Metal Machine Music is a twisted kind of artistic stake in the ground for Lou Reed – imagine him as the stern father figure, you are the misbehaving youngun’, and MMM is the belt. Lou doesn’t want to go there – it hurts him more than it hurts you, believe it – but goddammit he will if he has to, so you better shape it up buster. But it’s also much more than that – it’s the canvas for a thousand jokes, it makes Sally Can’t Dance sound brilliant, and it’s rare as a five-lear clover because nobody bought it the first time around. RCA was toking opium with unicorns if they printed more than 1,000 copies of this load.

Reed flirted with the S&M culture during his Velvet Underground days, so you have to give him credit for taking that spike heel to its logical, painful conclusion. On the inside gatefold art, he looks like Frankenstein’s coked up nephew, and his unintentionally hilarious liner notes conclude with “Anyway, hypertense people, etc. possibility of epilepsy (petite mal), psychic motor disorders, etc., etc., etc. My week beats your year.” Thanks a bunch Lou, can I get a side of fries with my bleeding eardrums?

Listen: Metal Machine Music