I would venture to say that this band was instrumental.
No vocals — but they were instrumental in another way as well.
The band was instrumental in defining early guitar music. They were influential in rock and roll and pioneered a sound called ‘surf music.’ Nokie Edwards was the lead guitarist.
‘Walk Don’t Run’ may have been their best known album. I find the Ventures and their pop and surf co-horts, Dick Dale, Duane Eddy, Chet Atkins, the Chantays, the Surfaris and others to be quite easy to listen to as it can fade into the background. But a listener paying close attention can hear the precise guitar runs and fabulous picking.
If this is your thing, it might be best to get one of several greatest hits albums. This wasn’t really an album band so the greatest hits work well both as individual slices and an overall vibe. That may run you up to 20 bucks so perusing the bargain bins, like I did, might produce a good find like my album -original press in mono – for under $5.
Scoop is a two-record grab bag from Who guitarist Pete Townshend.
It’s not good. There’s no there there.
I’ve just listened to two records (four album sides) of demos, outtakes, studio tomfoolery, and alternate versions.
It’s one of those recordings meant for the trash heap, or at least kept private, but instead ends up in a store somewhere with a price sticker on it.
These albums are built on the belief that the public is riveted to every bent G note from the master musician. It’s esoterica for true diehards who are fascinated by the way their guitar hero noodles around in the studio with his mechanical devices. There’s a song ‘Initial Machine Experiments,’ and another ‘Unused Piano – Quadrophenia. (I do like ‘Piano Tipperary, however (all 1 minute of it.)
So, I think we have established that I don’t like ‘outtake’ albums. But for pure confounding full disclosure, one of the best records in this category is ‘Odds and Sods’ by you guessed it: The Who. And I like it. At least I did once. But maybe it was because I was older then, but am younger than that now. I will be reviewing that one when we get to the ‘W’s’.
Maybe you have to read the extensive liner notes to understand the significance of this mess. Pete, himself, offers a clue in the liner notes on the cover (to distinguish between those written reveries for every single one of the 25 songs and snippets.)
No, ha ha, you say. This scathing critique is coming from a man who is chronicling and reviewing all 678 records in my collection, even the Partridge Family and Bobby Sherman????
Well, yes, but I’m not charging for my mess.
Townshend in his liner notes seems to want to offer an explanation.
“These enthusiasts of Who music and the part I played in it will probably welcome this record to add to their stockpile of obsessive memorabilia.”
No.
I mean, yes, there will be some that love to obtain the strummed acoustic versions of songs that sound great only when played loud.
Townshend explains in the liner notes, how he just bought a new TEAC portable studio which has led to 40 songs without words as he is touring with the band. Uh oh.
Now, I like Townshend and admire his songwriting and guitar playing. His voice strains to be strong never quite making it — that’s why they have Roger Daltrey. I really enjoyed Townshend in an English folky record with Ronnie Lane called Rough Mix. I thought his solo album ‘Empty Glass’ was solid.
Now somebody must like this. I Googled e-Bay and Amazon and see copies of my album going used for more than $30. Wait what’s this? Also for sale: Scoop 2 and Scoop 3?
ALBUMS: Labour of Love (1983): Little Baggariddim (1986)
MVC Ratings: Labour 4.5/$$$$; Little 3.5/$$$
Named after a British unemployment form (Unemployment Benefit Form 40), this band, once it got going, certainly didn’t have to stand in any lines for filling out forms during a long career that included 70 million records sold.
‘Labour of Love’ is a fantastic album of reggae covers originally done by obscure artists (at least to most American ears).
One of their biggest hits “Red Red Wine” was originally written and recorded by Neil Diamond and not in a reggae way. ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ by Jimmy Cliff was another big one off of this album.
The album provided worldwide exposure for such Jamaican groups as the Grand Melodars, Winston Groovey, Eric Donaldson, and the Slickers. If you want original reggae hits, try Cliff’s excellent movie soundtrack ‘The Harder they Come.”
‘Little Baggeriddm’ is an EP (extended play), which means more than a .45 but not quite a full album. A cover of ‘I Got You Babe,’ popularized by Sonny and Cher, went high on the charts in the UK. Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders played Cher.
If you spot a good copy of Labour of Love and don’t have it, I would jump on it. In a way it is like Dr. John’s ‘Gumbo,’ taking fun, bouncy songs from an overlooked or niche genre and spreading them around the world.
ALBUMS: October (1981); Under a Blood Red Sky (1983)
MVC Ratings: October 4.0/$$$$; Under a Blood Red Sky 4.5/$$$$
I only have these two early U2 albums on vinyl. I have several others on homemade cassette tapes and CDs.
The groundbreaking Irish band was a ubiquitous soundtrack to life in the 1980s and 90s. Bono’s larger than life persona and the Edge’s cutting guitar were and are instantly recognizable. They have sold 150 million records.
But I’m not here to review all of U2 here. The two LPs I have will allow a peek into what some critics and die hard fans say is the the best band of its era.
‘October’ in 1981 is a ‘pre-fame’ record. The band had picked up critical kudos for its first album, ‘Boy.’. And while October one had all the hallmarks of the band, it didn’t exactly skyrocket in sales, partially I think due to some weaker cuts on the album and the fact that people were not accustomed to the sound which was really like no other in the heart of the New Wave synth laden songs. I guess you could say they were like the Clash with more love and a little less anger.
‘Under a Blood Red Sky’ is a live mini album which actually has nearly the length of a regular LP. Recorded at the gorgeous venue Red Rocks in Colorado, it shows U2 becoming U2: anthemic protest songs with a simple but effective musical format of guitar, bass, drums and vocal.
“How long,? How long must we sing this song,” Bono asks in ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’
“I Will Follow’ and ‘New Year’s Day’ remain rock classics.
The Edge’s chiming guitar is a perfect fit for Bono’s big vocals as was the name the Edge for the style of guitar he plays. The guitar would shimmer, sting and wail and walk up to the edge of power chord metal but never took the step.
Named after the despicable Dicken’s character, Uriah Heep can be viewed in two ways. The worst way is that they are clunky slog rockers that sound no better than the worst songs by Jethro Tull (minus flute) and Deep Purple.
Another, more upbeat way would be to describe them as progressive rock practitioners with a loyal fan base and many years of output.
I am handicapped in that I only have one album, their first, released in 1970. And based on this album, I lean towards the former description rather than the latter.
The band features wah-wah guitar, heavy organ elements, and generic rock singing. This is in the era when I was listening to the previously reviewed UFO. After several decades, I remembered most all of the songs on my UFO albums. I didn’t remember any of these except the lead-off on side 2 called ‘Dreamare’ (yes that’s the title!) It has a La La La chorus and that’s what I remember.
Nevertheless, they made 24 albums together and sold 45 million records. So there you go.
They did have a song or two on other albums I enjoyed. One was a song many may remember called ‘Easy Living.’
ALBUMS: No Heavy Petting (1978); Phenomenon (1974)
MVC Ratings: Heavy4.0/$$$$; Phenomenon 4.0/$$$$$
These albums bring me back to Indiana, where I went to Klondike Junior High School.
Our nickname was the Nuggets and there was a little prospector dude with a pick-ax as our mascot. You can’t make this stuff up people.
Why we in the country and cornfields outside of West Lafayette, Indiana, had a gold mining theme, I don’t know. Indiana was flat as a pancake and if you looked to the west you could see Illinois.
UFO was a hard rock band, so much so that if not for the slower numbers would be considered Heavy Metal. But this was mid-1970s and the term heavy metal as a genre was in its infancy with bands like Black Sabbath leading the way.
Despite its hard rock reputation, UFO was a tuneful band, with technically proficient guitar playing mainly from Michael Schenker. He had previously worked in the German band the Scorpions, a band similar in aptitude and fluid guitar (by his brother Rudolph Schenker). The lyrics were banal, but that’s OK. They knew how to tap into the teen angst like all the hard rock bands were doing at this time. I just found that UFO sounded better than most of this ilk.
The summer after we had moved to Georgia, I was 15 and took a Greyhound to see my friends. (My poignant historical detail: We moved a lot. And these were some of the closest friends I had made heretofore in my young life.).
On the bus ride down I sat next to a Vietnam Vet drinking tall cans of beer (‘tall boys’).
“Where you headed man?’ the vet asked.
‘Indiana I said,’ I replied.
Oh shit,’ he said. “Indiana is the armpit of the nation.’
I still remember looking through the bus window as he said it and saw the rows of corn; it was probably mid-to-late summer, and time for the hard work of de-tasseling the corn. Occasionally, the landscape would be broken by a stand of trees or a little town that time forgot. The half-drunk vet wasn’t far off in his assessment, but as you’ll see later in the story, Indiana wanted me.
I got up there and the older brother of a friend let me stay in his trailer, at least part of the time. Good times, as we listened to UFO, REO Speedwagon (which was decidedly more hard rock than they became later in life.) And we listened to Led Zeppelin, lots of Zeppelin — in a hot sticky trailer baking in the Indiana summer heat.
There’s something about that time and place I’ll never forget; years later I related to the songs of Indiana singers like John Mellencamp and John Hiatt chronicling the nowhere feeling I got. It was a sad feeling of loss; Its origin I could not pinpoint.
One night near the end of my stay, we all piled into a big American-made car, about five of us. A friend said his family was going out of town and we could come over and play pool in the basement and maybe swim in a pool. Heck yeah, we were down for that. The house was like a mansion to us. Time passes and I guess we started getting louder as the caretaker of the property confronted us. A small hermit-like man, who lived on property, said he had called the police. Our pleas that we were invited did not persuade the caretaker, now yelling at us. So, we hopped in our car as Led Zeppelin wailed ‘keep me from the gallow’s pole.’
The police eventually caught up with one of our group at his home after running the car tag. My friends got into various degrees of trouble for that night’s escapade.
Me? I was on a Greyhound bus running southbound to my new home in Georgia.
Tom Verlaine is not a name that surfaces much these days. But in the 70s with the band, Television, Verlaine and his co-horts, including Richard Lloyd, created quite a stir with the ringing guitar sound of its debut album Marquee Moon.
‘Adventure,’ their sophomore offering is just as good, I think. Released in 1978, Adventure continued the guitar sound heralding punk’s transformation into more melodic music. New Wave was upon us.
Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were the guitarists, alternating lead and rhythm. Some of the longer guitar parts sound like a smoother Neil Young epic (think ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ or ‘Like a Hurricane.’)
I remember getting this in Athens, Ga. at WUXTRY, it came out my senior year in high school.
Motown, the extremely successful record company, left no rock unturned, no trend passed over.
Call it psych-soul or soul-psych, this was soul music tricked out to take advantage of the late-1960s, early 1970s, popularity of psychedelic music.
Norman Whitfield, a Motown producer who worked quite a bit with the Temptations, was the key player behind this outreach.
Billie Calvin, Brenda Evans and Joe Harris were the members of this group. The group had a No. 3 hit, ‘Smiling Faces, Sometimes,’ written by Whitfield.
Whitfield liked to cover his bases by giving songs to multiple groups inside the Motown stable which explains why the Temptations also did the ‘Smiling Faces’ song. (Whitfield also gave the song ‘War’ to the Temptations and then to Edwin Starr who took it to No. 1).
Other songs on this debut album include a surprisingly faithful rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone; the 60’s psych-pop classic ‘Aquarius;’ and the much covered groove song, ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine.’ Written by Whitfield, and Barrett Strong for Gladys Knight and the Pips, the song was ultimately covered by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Marvin Gaye.
Gaye’s version is considered by critics to be the definitive one. I like Gaye’s and the Pips’ and CCR’s — it’s fun to listen to try to discern what goes into the very different arrangements.
Also on this album is ‘Ball of Confusion (That’s what the world is today).
‘People movin’ out, people movin’ in, Why, because of the color of their skin,’
One of many rock’n’roll songs that helped shape my world view as a kid.
However, the version I heard on the radio was probably the Temptations’ hit version of the song. (There goes Whitfield again, hedging his bets.)
It’s the little things that Lewy body dementia makes more difficult.
Tearing open a wrapped cookie. Typing. Remembering where you put your glasses.
Parkinson’s Disease, Lewy’s cousin, can work much of the same territory.
Remembering what day of the week it is. Picking up your feet to walk. Putting on a shirt.
I don’t know if it’s better to have a pull-over shirt so that I may tie myself into a knot as I push my head through a sleeve instead of the neck hole.
Like a newborn baby getting pushed out of the birth canal my pulled-tight face, stuck in my sleeve, looks real funny in the mirror.
Or should my early morning hijinks start with a buttoned-down shirt where I spend 15 minutes to push those plastic buttons sideways into a too-small hole only to find out that the buttons on the right side of my shirt didn’t go into the correct holes on the left side of my shirt. Aaaaargh!
Maybe I’ll leave it, no one will notice. OK, that might have worked except, upon further inspection, I missed with the buttons by two holes each. My shirt looks like a Picasso painting.
Ah, maybe I should button the shirt beforehand and then pull it over my head? That might work except there’s already a tangled up, pull-over shirt halfway on my torso. So I walk (carefully) downstairs looking like a shirt rack and approach my beloved wife and caregiver and meekly say: Help.
It’s the little things.
Like climbing out of the bed in the morning.
I’m pretty sure that someone rolls me up in two sheets, a quilt and a blanket, sometime in the middle of the night while I’m sleeping. Houdini could not get out of this straightjacket. I push away bad thoughts that Catherine does this as revenge for all the button and pull-over mishaps. (Hmm. It does buy her more peaceful coffee time before she’s confronted with the walking shirt rack.)
Wrapped like a mummy in bed sheets, I’m limited on how to contact help. I cannot stand up, so I can’t walk down for help. She keeps her phone with her so I could call her with my phone which is on the night stand about six inches from my face. My arms are tied, but I briefly entertain the idea of trying to peck at the phone with my nose.
It’s the little things. Lewy minutia, I call it.
But when you’re shuffling down the hallway, unable to find your glasses, with your head stuck in a sleeve, it can seem rather daunting.
NOTE: This is a fictionalized account based on real events. And the names have not been changed.
If you listen closely you’ll hear an occasional guitar. But you have to really listen. Ultravox is very much a synth band, and it’s not synthesizer heavy in the name of progressive rock.
Judging from this collection of 20 Ultravox tunes, the band was clearly in pursuit of the Top 40 — at least during the Midge Ure era from late 1979 to the mid 80s.
During that time they garnered seven Top 10 albums and 17 Top 40 singles in the UK.
1981’s Vienna was their biggest hit, but the band was not as successful in the US as they were in the UK. Vienna, for example, hit No. 3 in the UK while it only reached 163 in the US.
