Boy wonder vocalist out of the chute at the speed of sound.
Sweet 16 and burning white soul-boy vocals with the Box Tops.
Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane Ain’t got time to take a fast train Lonely days are gone, I’m a-goin’ home My baby, just-a wrote me a letter
Killer opening. What’s the encore?
Alex Chilton was going to be a Big Star.
He was, and he wasn’t. The star fell without anyone seeing it.
Oh, but a few did. An influential few remembered the shooting star.
A song by one of the world’s coolest bands, The Replacements, was titled Alex Chilton. REM declared him a divine inspiration.
Big Star had some big expectations. How could their three albums, or just one of them not set the world on fire.
After that didn’t play out, Chilton did something many would do. Screw it. I’ll do what I want, start an indie career where you put out albums like this one where songs like Volare — are you kidding me?– become part of the buoyant fun. Toss off a Carole King song here, an obscure instrumental, and not so subtle (or sexy) invitation to get naughty.
All in fun. And it was, sort of. Sad, too.
Chilton died at 59 in 2010.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
ALBUM: The Chambers Brothers’ Greatest Hits (1971)
MVC Rating: 4.0/$$$
The question is did people know what they were getting into with the Chambers brothers. The band’s hit ‘Time has Come Today’ is relatively straightforward on the edited version that charted on the radio, under three minutes.
But good gosh, the 11-minute album cut pulled out a little Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and Soft Machine into a psychedelic stew of soul and gospel.
Most of the rest of the album is good old soul shouting and grooving. Decent cover of People Get Ready. Hard to top Curtis on that though. Entertaining music for a ride into the county on Saturday night headed to a barnstormer in the morning.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the soul songs and I like the long song.
ALBUMS: The Cars (1978); Candy-O (1979); Panorama (1980); Shake it Up (1981)
MVC Rating: Cars 4.5/$$$; Candy-O 4.0/$$$; Panorama 4.0/$$$; Shake it Up 3.5/$$$
Let’s see. The soundtrack of my high school days:
Born to Run, Springsteen in 1976.
Night Moves, Seger in 1977.
Just What I Needed, The Cars in 1978.
The Cars? It’s almost like which one of these things doesn’t belong game.
But their self-titled first album sold 6 million. That’s a lot of high school soundtracks. Overall the group is well past the 20 million mark over a span of a half dozen or so records.
Yet, I played the first Cars album recently for one of my daughters, now 31, and she asked who that was copying David Bowie?
Controversial Vargas pin-up was cover of 2nd album, Candy-O
Or could it be Roxy Music knock-offs? For some reason, the Cars seem to be this mega-grossing band that turned into a passing phase. (Enter good car analogy here. No not the DeLorean.) It seems that the group zoomed through the 70s and 80s at 100 mph and disappeared in a -cloud of dust. I like the analogy ‘Vanishing Point,’ the movie. Shift into 5th gear if you get that reference.
Ok, here’s how I break it down. The debut is dynamite, first to last song. These guys had a sharp austere playing style with catchy hooks. Very precise crunching chords and quick pick bass lines. It’s all within the framework of power pop. They were just better at it than anybody else. Their sound popped, probably courtesy of producer Roy Thomas Baker (Queen).
Earlier I reviewed The Beat, led by Paul Collins, and mentioned one of their songs ‘Don’t Wait Up For Me,’ one of power pop’s best songs. It was a Cars-like song. Only the Cars had about 10 or so of that quality over the course of their half-dozen or so albums. Many if not most were on that first one. I have four Cars albums and I don’t listen to them too much anymore. The lyrics were about nothing or nothing much, arch, bouncy but never really went beyond the hooks’ catchphrases.
I am one of a seeming minority that actually liked Panorama which had a little more complicated songs and a little more experimentation. But truth be told, the Cars were never as good as that 1st album. Indeed few artists had debut albums that strong. In the end, they fell victim to a formulaic sameness. But there were moments on later albums: ‘Touch and Go’ and ‘Shake it Up.’
On that debut, there were sharp guitars and radio friendly songs throughout — with the band nailing the walk-off with the last three songs of side 2: “It’s all Mixed up.””Bye Bye Love”and “Moving in Stereo.”
However, when I feel myself nostalgic about those HS cruising days, I usually go back to Springsteen, Seger, a little less, or the classics, Rolling Stones (I even enjoyed the Stones’ and Rod Stewart’s disco eras. Don’t quote me on that.) Daddy I’m a Fool to Cry.
One soundtrack that can’t go without mentioning here came out when I was about 17. Elvis Costello’s ‘My Aim is True’ album. Opened my ears to a new style, on a similar road, paved the way for the Cars.
Had the Costello on cassette. Played that in my Mustang until it broke. And of course there was Zeppelin.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
ALBUMS: Peter Case (1986); Peter Case EP ‘Selections from Peter Case’ (Promotional 1986)
MVC Ratings: 4.0/$$$
Peter Case is an artist I bought most likely in Birmingham at Chuck’s WUXTRY. It was Case’s self-entitled debut and a great record. I thought he was going places, and he did, I suppose. I just lost track of him after a CD called Six Pack of Love, which I should go back and give a listen to see why he kind of fell from my listening purview.
He started young in a power pop New Wave band, the Nerves, and followed with a pretty successful run in a band called the Plimsouls (which I will review later).
promo ep
For his debut he turned into a Woody Guthrie/Dylan styled singer-songwriter. His hat (fedora?) is on his noggin on both the album cover and back picture. And it’s on in his slightly different cover shot of his five-song EP promotional edition, which gets you an accoustic version of Steel Strings. Back photo shot is of Case walking away down the road, in slightly oversized suit (w/hat) and carrying a case that looks too small for a guitar.
His music sounds like that. Lots of strumming, lots of melodious story-telling. Best one is ‘Small Town Spree’ about a friend’s burglary splurge. The Van Dyke Parks’ arrangement, with strings accenting the steel strum goes like this:
It all started at Gate’s liquor store, you helped yourself to a bottle of scotch; Strolled down to Miller’s Drugs, forged a check and borrowed a watch
I do like his version of the Pogue’s song “A Pair of Brown Eyes’ — good pub song. If you think you would like a more seriousTodd Snider or a more bluesy Shawn Mullins, Case may be worth checking out.
In the liner notes Case writes: ‘My sister told me on the phone she heard someone on the radio singing about small towns in America.’
Case continues. ‘I said I didn’t know any songs about America – these songs are all about sin and salvation.’
NOTE: Case was in the Nerves with Paul Collins, later of the Beat, a power pop juggernaut. A who’s who of artists assisted on this Case debut, including T Bone Burnett, Van Dyke Parks, John Hiatt, Jim Keltner, Mike Campbell, Roger McGuinn and Victoria Williams, among others.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
This is an important album by an important band. Camper Van Beethoven have something to say.
These California, early indie, alternative songmakers make you work to figure out what they were trying to say. But in the work therein lies the answer, or at least the point. And that point? Something about skewering and deconstructing suburbia, and making fun of popular culture and Patty Hearst. All legit rock angles, for sure.
Whether it was about the Eye of Fatima or figuring it all out, it was well played and it sounded about right.
One of these days
When you figure, figure it all out
Well be sure to let me know
David Lowery’s voice drips rock ‘n roll irony, as guitars get circled by a violin. This is a band whose first real ‘hit,’ if you can call it that, was: “Take the Skinheads Bowling.’
Every day, I get up and pray to Jah And he increases the number of clocks by exactly one
Everybody’s comin’ home for lunch these days
Last night there were skinheads on my lawn
Take the skinheads bowling …
If you like this Camper Van Beethoven album, you might also explore Key Lime Pie, a follow-up album which has that wonderful take on human optimism, ‘When I Win the Lottery.”
Also, I highly recommend a spin-off band, Cracker, which I also have digitally only. Kind off like a more rocking Camper stripped of artsy flourishes (and violin).
Cracker was known for the song that had the line: Cause what the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a hole in my head.
Good stuff. Cracker and Camper. David Lowery is the common key creative force here. He looks at things a little differently.
For example thanking Patty Hearst, the Revolutionary Sweetheart, for making life more interesting.
Oh, my beloved revolutionary sweetheart I can see your newsprint face turn yellow in the gutter It makes me sad How I long for the days when you came to liberate us from boredom From driving around from the hours between five and seven in the evening
My Beloved Tania
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
NOTE TO HIDDEN POEM SEARCHERS: YOU NEED TO CLICK THE TITLE OF THE WARNING POST. THE NEW ‘HIDDEN POEM‘ IS AT THE BOTTOM (‘THE SWITCH IS REAL IS OLDER)’
As a short preamble to what I am attempting here, I write this note. At best, I’ve dabbled in poetry. I took it in college at Auburn under the esteemed Dr. John Nist, now deceased, who said he thought i showed promise. We had to read our poems in front of the class. He was encouraging, yes, until I actually started to process what he said. What’s promise in the poetry field? I wondered. I went into Journalism, which at that time post-Watergate, was a popular major. I continued to dabble in poetry. I took literature classes, admired poets from Blake to Yeats to Hopkins and American poets Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, ee cummings, Whitman, T.S. Elliott, and Dylan Thomas. And, of course, Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan.
Gerard Manley Hopkins Wikipedia public domain
But I can’t say I’ve looked at poetry or seriously thought of writing it again until this brain diagnosis. I will tell you I still can’t read two pages of Joyce’s Ulysses and make sense of it — but it does fascinate me, the word play, the obscure and dense references, and the stream of consciousness, kind of like a Capt. Beefheart album.
So, without further ado, here’s my poem:
This Switch is Real
The expansive Sleep fell away
To consciousness just like the Big Switch
On, off. On, again?
She drinks the clear water. And puts the biscuits up.
Yesterday’s coffee at bedside. Like every day.
But it’s not my coffee. Not my bed. I dreamed I looked at my hands last night. And feet.
I had shiny black shoes. I need to grab the railing.
There are cereal bowls with milk on the bottom. Silly soft cotton pajama bottoms.
Morning? It’s Friday, no, Thursday. A 24-hour interval intervenes, droops over the table.
I fold the clocks. Put them in that space. TV blares for argument sake. In another space. What a good space, she says. Toast burns.
Hello? Hello? I want to hold my girls Hannah, Emily, Claire.
Catherine. Himmelman name-check. God Bless You.
The flowers match the curtains, how odd, yellow-green.
Not the matching colors, the flowers. Are they real?
Buzzing voices hum with low talk.
They are all here. I know them all but do not really.
The light dims with time. Lord knows what time it is.
Are they my hands?
How can it be?
Music is hard to hear in the air. Need a better conductor. Stand By Me.
No. Let It Be. The hardcore life is not where it’s at.
Heavy, I helped lower the titanic vehicle into the hole.
I’m typing my letter of resignation. It was an interesting experiment. I made a ripple; Everyone makes ripples. So many ripples. Fat-skinny ripples. They crash, clash and push against each other until finally smooth.
Am I alive?
Bang, you’re dead. This Switch is real.
I Am.
Oh My God
(Mike Oliver, Jan. 14, 2018)
NEW POEM
Congratulations you have found the Hidden Poem. Now explain it.
Ha! Not so easy. Even for me.
Lots of riffing off rhymes, after market sand blasting. Still doesn’t blast, far enough to find the underlying truth. The truth, lying under.
So here we go.
The Hidden Poem
This is about the mind.
Brain drops keep falling
But a hard rain yet to come
Burn the Beatles, shake it up
Like a hurricane
Keep in mind. Keep your mind.
Cross out the triangle and orchestrate a reversal to a circle. It’s a dance.
Burn the Beatles shake it up
Here in Birmingham.
Play date. Replay. The grievance system all day.
OK, OK,
Call the man, go ahead call the Man.
Burn the Beatles break it up.
Combo unit, turntable, CD,
Blue Ray, Radio, TV,
AM/FM., PM, LMNOP.
TeeeVeee.
Burn the Beatles. Shake it up.
Remember and hit save. For later you ex-Hume the past. I Think.
Therefore. You Are. Don’t put DesCartes before the hors
Tainted from an Apple byte.
Don’t Soft Cell my brain sell.
Burn the Beatles. Shake it up.
The MC is KC. Discipline. Words.
Word.
Badger, banter. Re-Cognition.
Not fragile words fall to the ground and shatter into a thousand pieces. What? OK, a million pieces. What? Okay, a billion pieces.
No sunshine needed KC. Shake your booty, Shake your groove thing. Shake like Alabama Shakes. Towns in splinters from winds of violent change. Like a bent fire hydrant.
And red white and blues from an orange tyrant
What Marvin said. Mercy.
Keep in mind.
In mindfulness you will find.
Keep in mind there’s no revelation.
Except for this: You are the cherry on top of creation.
ALBUMS: Original Gold Hits. Vol. 1 (Johnny Cash, 1969); Ticket to Ride (Carpenters, 1970)
MVC Rating: Carpenter 3.0/$$; Cash 4.5/ $$$
Iconic is a word way overused these days. I should know, I love the word so I overuse it.
Catherine Willis( Oliver) signed copy;.
But I’m tying Johnny Cash and Karen Carpenter together because their voices, wildly, widely different, are iconic voices in the USA and beyond.
Iconic as in widely known and distinguished by excellence. Thanks Merriam-Webster.
Now I’m doing the cliché of using a dictionary definition as a lede (newspaper spelling for opening).
Focus. Stay focused.
Voices. “Hello I’m Johnny Cash.” You can hear it as you read it.
Not beautiful but craggy as a Tennessee ridge. Lifeworn and tinged with emotion.
His voice elevated the sometimes banal words he sang. Oh, he had dozens of classics, but there were some duds in his decades of songwriting and singing. Ballad of a Teenage Queen? I could live without that one for, oh, the rest of my life.
Karen on the other hand had the voice of an angel. A relaxed contralto or alto, I don’t know much about these music types. But it was different from the high timbre styles popular today. It was soft, deep and ever so slightly sultry. Like Mom putting you to sleep with a lullaby. It was butter. This Ticket to Ride album is their first and it was originally called ”Offering.’ It suffers from too much of brother Richard singingl and overdone arrangements. It was almost as if they didn’t know what they had with Karen’s voice.
The Johnny Cash record is a compilation of his early hits and they are iconic, or classic if you will.
Folsom Prison Blues, a song he wrote, has the classic line: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” Now he’s stuck in Folsom prison worrying about all the good food he is missing when the train comes presaged by its lonesome whistle.
A cold callous murdering line in a song that somehow resonated with mainstream audiences as part of the deep-throated storytelling of Johnny Cash. He had some tragedy in life, a couple of arrests for amphetamines but he never served hard time beyond a few short stints in jail. He did however play live at San Quentin, and his appearance helped turn around the life of an inmate. I wanna be a singer, convict Merle Haggard said after hearing Cash play.
Karen of course faced her own demons. What happened to her, starving herself to death, belied her persona, her songs, her voice. One can see the Man in Black crossing over once in awhile to the dark side. But few beyond Karen Carpenter’s inner circle, knew the pain inside Karen. From this experiment of a first album, she went on to produce standards of vocal pop, Closer to You, We’ve Only Just Begun. That’s what we’ll remember her for.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
Here are two albums I’m going to review together because, well, it seems like a good idea as I type this.
There’s nothing that really ties them together other than they were out of the mainstream of rock. Captain Beyond was a hard rocking psychedelic band made up of members of several well -known hard rock bands: Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, and Johnny Winter.
Captain Beefheart, on the other hand, is kind of a legendary California artist who put the avant in avant-garde. Surrealism is another word associated with him. He collaborated with Frank Zappa some. He was apparently considered a child prodigy and sculpted at age 3. ‘Nuff said. The double LP Trout Mask Replica was considered his masterpiece.
The music of Captain Beyond starts promisingly enough with Sufficiently Breathless, which is the airy light and nicely played title track. But from here on, it’s hit and mostly miss including some spacey backward tracking loop leading to a sort of a Sourthern-fried jam band ditty called ‘Everything is a Circle.’ I agree. But am not too hot on the song which accelerates as it moves amid a glossy crunch of power chords, into nowhere, or maybe the beyond.
While Beyond take themselves seriously, Beefheart aka Dan Van Vliet and crew clearly does not. With songs like Hey Garland I Dig Your Tweed Coat, and Semi-multicolored Caucasian. The band flows in and out of traditional song structures (usually out), using accoustic guitar interludes, with switched up thrash as background to Van Vliet’s surrealistic raps.
For example: “Bumblebees, their wings arranged with pictures out of the past and the rainbow baboon gobbled fifteen fisheyes with each spoon’
That’s not surreal, that’s twisted Captain Kangaroo. Or just bad sushi?
For examples of both Captains’ strange music listen below.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
When Particles Collide signed album. I saw them play on Eric’s back porch.
ALBUM : Ecotone/This Town (2016)
I am once again interrupting the order of MVC to play a new album by an up and coming band.
The band is called When Particles Collide and it has an unusual story.
This is a wife and husband duo: Sasha G. Alcott and Christopher M. Viner.
That’s not what is so unusual, though. Remember Sonny and Cher, Captain and Tennille? Well, Sonny, this is no Captain and Tennille, (just thought I’d Cher.)
What’s unusual is that the couple — although playing locally and touring occasionally off and on from their home state of Maine — decided at the ripe young ages of 40-something to quit their day jobs to tour the country for 14 months. Doing that rock‘n roll thing. When I say country, I mean country. Their Unstoppable Tour, after dozens of dates in the great Midwest and beyond, WPC still has plenty more dates planned, ranging from West Virginia to Florida.
My ‘old man’s league’ basketball buddy Eric Stockman is a friend of the band and I listened to them play live on his porch here in the Birmingham metro area a few months back. I initially plannedto put my autographed record into my pile and do a post when the W’s rolled around on MVC. But given the fact that they are currently on tour, I just decided I’d go ahead and do this post.
They were great in their porch concert. A good friend bought me their album which Sasha and Chris graciously signed.
It’s a scorcher with stinging guitars and strong vocals from Sasha reminiscent of Heart’s Ann Wilson or Pat Benatar to reach back a ways for a reference. Way more Joan Jett and not at all Captain and Tennille. There’s also a Talking Heads, Suburbs artsy funky thing about them. (Suburbs, wow, pulled that one from some ninja brain cell that’s fighting off rogue proteins.)
I like the album a lot but I did miss one thing from the porch concert and that was a little softer sound such as when they did a gorgeous cover of John Prine’s ‘Angel From Montgomery.’
Coincidentally, I am also pleased to announce that they will be releasing, according to Stockman, an acoustic album. Can’t wait. And while I still have the mic, I’d request ‘Angel.’ And if the duo would consider a suggestion for a cool funky song befitting Sasha’s vocal abilities, I’d love to hear her tackle Sly Stone’s ‘If You Want Me to Stay.’
emotion.
