OK so it’s spicy rockabilly. Extra spicy. Hot sauce, dirty rice.
It’s actually an Elvis parody record. Except for the fact that there is some good music on here, it’s a novelty record. With Howard Stern humor that was funny as heck in the 6th grade. Only thing that saves it is some searing rockabilly guitar and some artless Elvis vocal ticks.
From the song ‘Aloha from Hell.’
Gonna take a week offGonna go to hellSend ya a postcardHey I'm doin' swellWish you were hereAloha from Hell.
That song is one of the tamer songs. I hope I didn’t really think record was all that funny even when I was 25 or so. But there is some demented rockabilly, for sure.
ALBUMS: KIng of America (1986); Imperial Bedroom (1982); Get Happy (1980); Armed Forces (1978)
MVC RATING: King 4.0/$$$$; Imperial 4.5/$$$$; Get Happy 4.0/$$$$; Armed Forces, 4.5/$$$$
I may have mentioned this before but Elvis Costello substantially opened my world to another kind of music. The Beatles first moved something inside and paved the way for this growing interest, or love, of music.
Because of the Beatles I found the Rolling Stones, the Who, CCR, Clapton, etc. Other paths, including my Dad’s records, led me to Louis Armstrong, jazz, and later different paths led me to Motown, Stax, Johnny Cash, the 11-year-old Michael Jackson, and so on. My Mom, I remember liked folk music, such as Peter Paul and Mary, and some Top 40 off the car radio in the 1970s. I actually remember singing along with mom and siblings to How Do You Do as we were driving. That song you may remember is one I have declared the Best Worst Song of all time.
By high school I was listening to mixed-tape cassettes I made, painstakingly, often on a theme. “Soft Rock” or “Hard Rock” or Best of Southern Rock” or, and this is true, I had one mixed tape called “Eclectic Mix.” As you can see my imagination was boundless. Not. My Eclectic Mix probably consisted of country rock and folk, a Rolling Stones song and a Dylan cover. With maybe an Al Green song. (No, that would be saved for my “Love songs” tape.)
But when I was in my last year of high school — “78 is great”– I somehow came across Costello. I actually had a store-bought tape of Costello’s debut and arguably his best — but that’s a big argument. “My Aim Is True’ was not radical in that it was busting new barriers, like the Beatles or the Clash for that matter.
This is melodic, angry, catchy and highly literate pop and rock coming out at a time when punk was making a lot of noise. I didn’t really get the Sex Pistols’ appeal beyond screaming about being pissed off. Now Costello was pissed in a literate and often amusing way.
While we, HS seniors, were playing air guitar to Stairway to Heaven, Dream On, Free Bird and Frampton Comes Alive, along comes a guy bold enough to steal the King’s name. Wearing thick black ugly glasses, mind you. Damn.
As a songwriter he’s near genius.
But it was like nothing I had heard; I couldn’t get enough. Besides the cassette, I bought five albums over time of Costello. One, This Year’s Model, is missing from my collection, and it may have been the best. But the four (above) that I still have are excellent. And they are all different, even though marked with his distinctive vocals and artful lyrics. (Last thing, whomever I lent This Year’s Model to, just leave it on my porch, no questions asked. Come to think of it I’m missing a number of albums over the years, such as Bob Marley’s Natty Dread, and Deep Purple Made in Japan which had Highway Star and a scorching performance by Ritchie Blackmore. As usual, I digress).
Back to Costello, listen to these songs in video. The ‘Detectives’ video is, if you hang with it through the opening loud distortion, a pretty remarkable live performance of a clever song.
Memorable line: ‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take;
She’s filing her nails while they are dragging the lake.’
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.
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.’
Prince changed fruits when he went for Raspberry Beret. But that song along with the Beatles song have connection in mood and sound, if not fruit, with one of my 70s favorites: Strawberry Letter 23 by Brothers Johnson.
Coulda been a Beatles or Prince song.
There’s a lot of stuff on the interwebs about what this song was about: a letter, the 23rd in a pink envelope with strawberry scent. Hmm OK let’s delve into the lyrics to see where that leads:
In the garden, I see
West purple shower bells and tea
Orange birds and river cousins Dressed in green
Uh huh. Now I get it. But forget the fact that I don’t get it.
It sounds good. I love the opening organ fade-out/fade back in, the thumping, running bass line, the funky guitar. And the organ/guitar interlude that is either appropriated from the Who, Yes, or vice versa.
Oh and I really like the vocals even though the words are as obscurely nonsensical as Strawberry Field, flowing on a funk groove as easy as Raspberry Beret.
Put it on to dance because that, in this case, is what it is all about.
TRIVIA: Brothers Johnson won a Grammy for best R&B instrumental for ‘Q’ off of this album.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
Here’s one. Here’s one if you want to be cool and pull out of your collection this album featuring this very 80’s looking band wearing dark clothes with some leather. Kinda big hair.
You’re friend says ‘ha ha’ who is that? Just another band gone to obscuredom. But hey, let’s give it a spin.
Let’s give it a spin.
Broken Homes. Not sure what happened to them, probably obscurification. But they rock like they had a future and didn’t care if they did. Tuneful, good vocals, tight band. One of those best bands you’ve never heard of.
”I’ll Be Wearing Blue’ lays out a bluesy lament of a reluctant groom.
“Soon we will be married,” he sings, “Soon we will be done, soon we will drive to town, and we’ll pick out the perfect suit and tie. Your mama’s going to give me the money, I hope I cannot find my size.”
It was about 1986 or ’87 and several of my Birmingham News colleagues and I drove to Atlanta to see Tom Petty (RIP), the Georgia Satellites, and the Del Fuegos. Big show. Bob Carlton, Rick Bragg and Dennis Love, I believe were on this particular road trip.
Between sets waiting on Tom Petty they played, like they do, on the speakers a recording of this debut album from Broken Homes. It immediately caught my attention. I learned later Petty said in an interview he loved the band. But in the wacky world of the entertainment biz they never made it.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
Sometimes there’s a musical memory that is stronger than other memories. It starts in your mind but begins infusing the limbic system. It’s a mind out of body memory.
It was a night in Atlanta about 1980, could have been ’81. I was with my later to be wife Catherine, my brother and his friends. We were walking up to the party central area at that time, Little Five Points. I first heard the synthesizer. As we got closer it got louder.
There was the chorus: Money Changes Everything …
Then whirling looping synthesizer sounds from the leader of the band, Tom Gray. The song is one that could easily end up on my Top 10, maybe Top 15 rock songs of all time. Later Cyndi Lauper would make it a worldwide hit. But I still like this original.
I’ve got two cut-outs records of the Brains first two albums. They never made it really. In that regard they remind me of the Swimming Pool Q’s. Great bands, great songs. Both from Atlanta. Both had strong guitar playing and didn’t for the most part let New Wave affectations ruin the effect, or the music. Great bands that deserved wider appreciation.
Back to Little Five Points, I yelled to Cat. IT’S THE BRAINS. (For free I might add, playing outdoors.)
And just walking up live at the time they were playing a truly transcendent song, well there is a memory. I still feel it.
Other good songs off of Electronic Eden, ‘One in a Million’ and “Hypnotized.’ Off of their self-titled debut, the punkish ‘In the Night’’ and ‘Gold Dust Kids’ and rocking ‘Raeline.’
But I challenge you to listen to ‘Money Changes Everything’ three times. You’ll then know what I mean when I say, ‘Gray matters.’
Here’s video of Brains leader Tom Gray backed by Q’s singing ‘Money Changes Everything’ Live, followed by video of Cyndi Lauper smash hit cover:
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.
excellent. And they are all different, even though marked with his distinctive vocals and artful lyrics. (Last thing, whomever I lent This Year’s Model to, just leave it on my porch, no questions asked. Come to think of it I’m missing a number of albums over the years, such as Bob Marley’s Natty Dread, and Deep Purple Made in Japan which had Highway Star and a scorching performance by Ritchie Blackmore. As usual, I digress).
emotion.
