Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Does anybody out there actually LIKE Blood, Sweat & Tears? I mean, is it even POSSIBLE? Actually I know it’s possible because my friend Rick Piel likes them, openly admits it, and I’m doing my best to forgive him. Then again, what’s NOT to like about them? The bloviating brass? The rearguard horn arrangements of swingin’ Fred Lipsius? The big-boned vocal cords of the burly Mr. David Clayton-Thomas? The occasional classical flourishes? Hell, the real question is why doesn’t EVERYBODY love them?

Well, part of the answer lies in the fact that Blood, Sweat & Tears were the epitome of unhip. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—the Carpenters were so unhip that the renowned music critic Richard M. Nixon labelled them “Young America at its best.” But BS&T thought they were hip, when in fact they made the exploding dicks in Three Dog Night sound downright groovy by comparison.

And they didn’t help their own case by being the first rock band to wow the squares at Las Vegas, which automatically made them square by association. You are who you play for. Nor did they up their street cred any by agreeing to do a US State Department-sponsored tour of the Eastern bloc. Doing the bidding of the Nixon Administration didn’t win them any friends in the counterculture, and the counterculture let them know it—Abbie Hoffman and his Yippie pals showed up at a BS&T gig at Madison Square Garden after the band’s return to throw shit at them, and by shit I mean the kind you make with your butt.

But BS&T’s hip cred—which basically went out the window when band co-founder and certifiably hip personage Al Kooper walked out the door and the Broadway-ready David Clayton-Thomas walked in after the band’s 1968 debut LP—isn’t really the issue here. What made Blood, Sweat & Tears such a nauseating proposition was the horn-heavy band’s diabolical commitment to a big, brassy sound that combined fugitive elements of rock, jazz, R&B and (gak!) classical. The fusion was inarguable innovative—but then again so was the weaponization of anthrax—and made them the envy of every high school jazz band instructor from San Jose to Saigon.

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Remembering Wilson Pickett, born on this day in 1941. —Ed.

Hear ye hear ye: I am going to begin this review of Alabama native son Wilson Pickett’s 1969 LP Hey Jude by stating right off that the title cut is one of the most phenomenal songs ever recorded, and is in fact so great I would probably give this album an A even if every other song on it was a jingle for a cereal commercial.

Pickett, whom I consider the best screamer in the history of soul and R&B, if not rock too, lays into “Hey Jude” like somebody just chopped his foot off with a hatchet, while the horn section kicks ass and Duane Allman, who was just beginning his career as a session musician, tears off one of the most brilliant and in-your-face guitar solos you’ll ever hear. It’s a bravura performance, “Hey Jude,” and supernatural in its greatness, and if I die tomorrow I will die having heard a sound so pleasing to God that he decided (I’ve talked to him about this) to push the date of the Last Judgment back a hundred years or so.

Fortunately Pickett fills out the album with a bunch of other songs that, while they can’t (what could?) compare with “Hey Jude,” are excellent in their own right. His voice is a miracle, his screams make Joe Cocker sound like a pee wee leaguer, and in short he turns in a whole slew of superb performances, demonstrating his mastery of phrasing and the wild scream even on those songs (his unfortunate take on Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild,” the gospel-flavored but not very exciting “People Make the World,” and the funky but unhappily titled “Toe Hold”) that don’t quite measure up to the rest of the songs on the album.

Putting Pickett, Allman, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (the so-called Swampers), and some great horn players together in the studio was a stroke of genius on Atlantic Records honcho Jerry Wexler’s part, and it paid off in a royal flush as the bunch of ‘em simply could not fail to turn an okay song into a great one.

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Here’s a joke for ya: What do you call a glam rock band coming out of Florida in the early seventies? Deceased. Because as everybody knows Gator Country was Southern Rock territory, the natural-born stomping grounds of the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Outlaws and a slew of lesser lights. And if there was one thing guaranteed to make the most rearguard redneck fans of said bands (and even the gators wandering around like they owned the place) see red it was a band of limp-wristed fops in platform boots with stars painted on their faces, lowering the region’s nationwide high testosterone levels. Why, that’s the kind of damn fool stunt that could get a fella murderized.

But as impossible as it sounds Florida did produce an honest-to-God glam band in the early Seventies, and nobody killed them! They went by the name White Witch, and the first I heard of them was from a friend whose description of them went, “They were Ziggy Stardust come to Florida.” Well those words were like manna from Heaven to me—I just had to check White Witch out.

And all I can say having heard them is they were far weirder than I could have ever imagined. For the simple reason that they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be a glam rock band or a boogie band or a metal band or (and I’m not kidding here) a progressive rock band. Not only were they “Ziggy Stardust come to Florida” they were “Styx come to Florida,” and try to wrap that around your frontal lobe if you can. What were these guys doing? Did they not realize they were making your more combative Skynyrd fans shit Confederate battle flags?

Which isn’t to say they didn’t have some redneck in ‘em. Chuck Eddy, who put White Witch’s second and final album, 1974’s A Spiritual Greeting, at No. 266 on his list of the 500 best heavy metal albums in the universe, wrote that lead singer Ronn Goedert possessed “the craziest hickmetal throat this side of Mistah Jim Dandy himself,” and he’s right. A True Son of the South, Ronn Goedert, but it’s what he did with those Dixie tonsils of his, and what the band was doing around him as he was exercising said tonsils, that made all the difference. Cosmic rock wasn’t altogether taboo south of the Mason-Dixon line—just check out Black Oak Arkansas’ epic walk-through-the-halls-of-karma “Mutants of the Monster” if it’s proof you’re looking for.

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Mission of Burma were one of the best (and most abrasive) bands to emerge from post-punk Boston, and it’s a crying shame that their career was cut obscenely short in 1983 as a result of vocalist/ guitarist Roger Miller’s tinnitus. They left behind a 1981 EP and a 1982 full-length, and that would be all we’d have to remember their original incarnation by (they reunited in 2002) had they not, commencing in February 1982, done some moonlighting as the backing band for local berserker and future pioneer of the New Weird America movement Dredd Foole (aka Dan Ireton) under the name Dredd Foole & The Din.

If Mission of Burma tended towards chaos, they went right over the top as The Din. Lucky for us, especially given their singular lack of ambition—they never toured, and if you never lived near Boston you never heard ‘em—they left behind a number of recordings that constitute some of the most chaotic music of the era. And Dredd Foole & The Din’s output didn’t end when the Mission of Burma packed it in. No, Dredd Foole simply kept on going with the newly formed Volcano Suns, whose members included Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott, serving as the new Din.

My favorite of the Mission of Burma Din compilations is 2022’s Songs in Heat. The A side includes all of the songs they recorded at Radiobeat Studio on February 2, 1982, while the B side is made up of selected songs from a live show the band played at the Channel in South Boston on August 9, 1982. It’s a testament to the band’s commitment to the great unhinged that the studio recordings sound almost as Stooges-level feral as the live tracks. Foole and Mission of Burma obviously had their role models, including the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Pere Ubu, and they pay tribute to all three on the comp’s live tracks. They also, surprisingly enough, toss in a cover of the Animals’ 1967 classic “When I Was Young.”

Dredd Foole is not a polished vocalist. He’s a wild man with a hair up his ass and no particular interest in singing in tune. He sounds like a lot of people—my brother, who turned me on to them, gave me a laundry list that included “Nick Cave, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the guy from the Cramps, Joy Division, maybe the Psychedelic Furs guy, and a few other people I can’t recall.” That sounds about right.

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Celebrating Adam Clayton on his 64th birthday. —Ed.

For the longest time I had no use for U2—they were too sanctimonious and self-righteous was my opinion, and Bono stuck me as a frustrated Sunday school teacher. But as the years passed they loosened up, Bono became less of a tight-ass, and I discovered I enjoyed some of their songs, a lot. But there were plenty of haters to take my place, and they emerged from the dank caves we music critics inhabit to litter guano all over the band’s 1988 studio/live LP Rattle and Hum, the soundtrack of a rockumentary released the same year.

To cite just two of the album’s critics, The Village Voice’s Tom Carson called Rattle and Hum an “awful record” by “almost any rock-and-roll fan’s standard.” He went on to add that the LP’s sound wasn’t “attributable to pretensions so much as to monumental know-nothingism.” Meanwhile, David Browne of the New York Daily News said Rattle and Hum “just prattles and numbs.” The phrases “sincere egomania” and “the worst album by a major band in years” were also bandied about.

Rattle and Hum’s chief problem is it’s a dog’s breakfast, and lacks even the cheap glue to keep a model airplane in one piece. But I simply can’t bring myself to hate it—it includes some of my favorite U2 songs. Unfortunately they all happen to be the LP’s studio cuts, rather than the ones recorded during U2’s The Joshua Tree tour of the US.

To begin with the absolute low points, the only thing to be said for the forty-three second snippet of Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star Spangled Banner” is U2 had the common decency not to play the whole thing. As for the thirty-eight second snippet from “Freedom for My People” by Harlem street duo Sterling Magee and Adam Gussow, I guess you had to be there. And the live version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” is ham-fisted, and haven’t we heard the song seven million times too often already?

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Remembering Eric Carmen. —Ed.

It’s a miracle that anyone survives adolescence. And I’m not talking about drugs or driving 110 mph while on drugs or any of the other healthy activities normal teens engage in—no, I’m talking about potentially lethal sperm build-up. Speaking just for myself, I was a lusus naturae of unsated lust, and often found myself leering at vacuum cleaners. One day I discovered that my skull was producing an oily discharge, and it took a physician to inform me that I was literally secreting sperm through the follicles of my hair.

It was a lonely and demeaning condition, but fortunately I had the Raspberries. They were more than just the greatest power pop band ever—they were the Masters and Johnson of Rock. No other rock band has ever given more eloquent voice to the victims of adolescent hormonal overload. In such ardent and urgent songs as “Go All the Way,” “Tonight,” “I Wanna Be With You,” “Ecstasy,” and “Let’s Pretend,” The Raspberries spoke to the only subject that really mattered to poon-crazed teens like me—namely getting some, and preferably tonight.

The Raspberries formed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1970, the year after the Cuyahoga River caught fire: an ill omen in hindsight, for despite their polished Beatles and Mod-influenced sound, irresistible melodies, arresting guitar hooks, and heavenly vocal harmonies, the Raspberries never scored a No. 1 hit on the singles or album charts before breaking up in 1975. The band’s first single, 1972’s brilliant “Go All the Way,” rose all the way to the No. 5 spot. They were never to come as close to the top of the pops again.

While the Raspberries’ first three albums (1972’s Raspberries and Fresh, and 1973’s Side 3) contain all of the odes to teen lust the band is most famous for, I have always preferred their farewell LP, 1974’s Starting Over. Disappointing sales of Side 3 led to the replacement of bassist Dave Smalley and drummer Jim Bonfanti by Scott McCarl and Michael McBride, respectively, and McBride’s Keith Moon-like drumming in particular lent the band a much harder kick. Starting Over also has a slightly—and I do mean slightly—scruffier sound than its predecessors, and the combination of McBride’s drum pummel and less glossy production gives the album a sound that is more power than pop.

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Celebrating Greg Norton in advance of his 65th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Hard and fast rules so let’s dispense with the long instrumental intro and get right down to the nitty-gritty; on 1985’s New Day Rising, St. Paul, Minnesota power trio Hüsker Dü permanently set themselves apart from the hardcore pack by leavening the genre’s speed freak aesthetic with increasing dollops of real melody.

The results are still bracing, but New Day Rising is friendlier than most hardcore, and more welcoming too. Parts of it are even nice, nice in the way that the iconic album cover (two dogs, one beautiful body of water, a sunrise) is nice.

Most of the “nice” comes to us thanks to drummer/vocalist Grant Hart, who was the Jekyll to Bob Mould’s Hyde in what amounted to a schizophrenic division of band labor. Hart provided the melody, sweetness and light. Bob Mould provided the buzz saw guitar and angst; he may not have doing the fashionable by spitting bile at Reagan’s America, but his personal life sounded a hot mess. As for Greg Norton, he had a very cool mustache. And he played bass guitar.

New Day Rising is a sonic world away from Hüsker Dü’s 1982 debut Land Speed Record, a landmark in speedcore that more than lives up to its bragging title. But like their SST label mates the Minutemen and Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü soon chafed against the formal constraints of hardcore.

Unlike said bands, however, Hüsker Dü didn’t abandon hardcore altogether. Instead they set themselves to the business of expanding hardcore’s horizons by employing catchy riffs and hooks, and the results are to be heard on such sweet (and bordering on silly) Hart-penned cuts as “Books About UFOs,” which features a piano of all things. Betcha Ian MacKaye didn’t see that one coming.

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Celebrating Graham Coxon in advance of his birthday tomorrow.
—Ed.

Today on the Wayback Machine… we return to the Battle of Britpop! In last week’s corner at The Vinyl District: Northern England standard-bearer and contender for the crown, Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?! In today’s corner: Southern England’s pride and glory, Blur’s Parklife! Let the fight begin!

I should state from the outset that this is a battle involving different weight classes. The heavyweight Mancunians in Oasis opted for the knock out; (What’s the Story) is a slow but methodical series of big, telegraphed hooks to the pleasure center of your brain. Blur, on the other hand, is a lightweight and a dancer, and Parklife comes at you like a flurry of lightning quick blows to the thinking part of your cerebral cortex.

While Oasis opted for monolithic, Blur went the eclectic route; stylistically they’re all over the place. And they’re all over the place for a reason; they’re making a statement on the richness and variety of London itself. Samuel Johnson once said, “If you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life,” and Damon Albarn is clearly not tired of London or the multiplicity of genres and influences that have long made it one of the world capitals of rock music.

Unlike Noel Gallagher, who took his cue from Seinfeld and wrote a whole slew of songs about nothing, Blur’s Damon Albarn is a social satirist and details man. From the polymorphous perversity of “Girls and Boys” to the closely observed details of the title track to the working class desperation of the very punk “Bank Holiday” to the industrial dehumanization of “Trouble in the Message Centre,” Albarn is concerned with what it means to be young and English.

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The ghost of Amelia Earhart haunts us. That’s what happens when you’re history’s greatest vanishing act, and the most famous face to ever appear on a milk carton. When Earhart and navigator Frank Noonan took off from an airfield in Lae, New Guinea on July 2, 1937 everyone expected them to come back down, on tiny Howland Island to be precise. Instead they disappeared forever into the realms of myth, legend, obsession and theory—the quarry of sleuths, both amateur and professional, many willing to spend fortunes in her pursuit.

Did her plane, having run out of fuel, land in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean? Was she captured, and die at the hands of, the Japanese Army? Was she devoured, as some say, by coconut crabs, a lonely castaway on a desert island? Or did she end up on another island? Or is she up there still, the wings of her silver twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra sending phantom refractions from the rising sun, eternally searching for that final landing strip?

It surprises me how few songs have been written about Earhart’s mysterious fate. The best of them are the Handsome Family’s “Amelia Earhart vs. The Dancing Bear” from their 1996 release Milk and Scissors, Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” from her 1976 album Hejira, and “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” which was written by topical songwriter Red River Dave McEnery in 1939 and has been covered by the likes of Kinky Friedman, Ronnie Lane, the Greenbriar Boys, and the British country-rock band Plainsong, whose members of note were vocalist and guitarist Iain Matthew (a founding member of Fairport Convention and later of Matthews Southern Comfort) and guitarist and vocalist Andy Roberts, a Liverpudlian and former member of Everyone.

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Celebrating Gary Numan, born on this day in 1958. —Ed.

I’ve never warmed up to synthesizers, and isn’t that the point? They’re supposed to sound steely cold and inhuman–they’re machines, for christ’s sake, and utterly incapable of that friendly human touch one associates with, say, Eddie Vedder or your local insurance agent.

For this reason and many others having to do with angular haircuts and architectural clothing I’ve always abhorred English synthpop. But that was before I finally managed to overcome my atavistic aversion to the stuff long enough to listen to one of the grandaddies of them all–Gary Numan’s 1979 LP The Pleasure Principle.

Nothing succeeds like excess, and on his first post-Tubeway Army outing Numan dispensed with the electric guitars and went full robot. What’s more, not only do the synthesizers sound like machines–he does too. As a result this fancy piece of state-of-the-art electronics with its telegraphic one-word song titles is as cold as Antarctica–colder even because Gary got rid off all the penguins!

The Pleasure Principle–which is all about the pleasures and perils of alienation, and the myriad disadvantages of being sentient–may be as frigid as a meat locker, but it’s as hook-filled as a meat locker too. But not always–Numan also tosses in some frosty and atmospheric instrumentals (“Airlane,” “Asylum”) along the lines of David Bowie’s ambient work with Brian Eno. (As for the non-instrumentals, some bring to mind Eno’s early solo work, sans quirks.)

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The Stray Cats were the Sha Na Na of the MTV era. A rockabilly nostalgia act, and like most nostalgia acts they offered up a tame version of the music produced by the folks they were paying tribute to—Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Burnette—and the list goes on. They carried the torch. But they forget to light the damn thing.

The Stray Cats hued to the original sound, but they were far too polite—the early rockabilly crowd was composed of berserkers, and the Stray Cats were more Apollonian than Dionysian. The early folks were out to burn the cornfield. The Stray Cats were out to pay their respects. They had sound and image down pat but they weren’t into arson.

They left that to rockabilly’s other modern day practitioners—bands like the Cramps, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Hillbilly Hellcats, Flat Duo Jets and Southern Culture on the Skids, to name just a few. Bands that injected their rockabilly with a healthy dose of run-amok dementia. Guitarist and vocalist Brian Setzer had the right haircut and he sure could play, and the same went for drummer Slim Jim Phantom and bassist Lee Rocker. But what I never heard from them was the barbaric yawp that made their models menaces to the social mores of their day. They weren’t dangerous—tribute bands never are.

I’m certainly not the first person to question the Stray Cats’ overly respectful and ultimately weak-kneed take on one of rock’s most primal genres. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke bandied about the word “spiritless,” while Robert Christgau went for the jugular, writing that Seltzer’s “mild vocals just ain’t rockabilly. You know how it is when white boys strive for authenticity—’57 V-8 my ass.” Later he would get even surlier, writing, “Brian Setzer is the snazziest guitarist to mine the style since James Burton. But he’s also a preening panderer, mythologizing his rockin’ ’50s with all the ignorant cynicism of a punk poser. He’s no singer, no actor, no master of persona. And if he can write songs he didn’t bother.” Ouch.

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Remembering Chris Squire, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

I’ve seen all good people turn their heads each day, wondering out loud, “What is that awful sound?” And I have to tell them, “It’s the Yes album spinning on your turntable, dim bulb!”

That’s the intro I intended to use for what I figured would be a disparaging review of 1971’s The Yes Album. I’ve always been a big believer in the motto “Just Say No to Yes,” because the band has all the loathsome characteristics of your average “progressive” rock band. Castrato vocalist, check. Extraordinarily talented musicians who would sooner play some intricately difficult chord progression than just whomp you on the skull like Iggy and the Stooges, ditto. And fiendishly complex songs composed of like 10 intricately interwoven musical themes, present. But a terrible thing happened when I put The Yes Album on my turntable. Much to my surprise and dismay, I discovered I actually kinda like the fucker!

Me! Prog! Impossible! Implausible! Because prog-rock is the exclusive domain of skinny-armed guys (women hate prog, it’s what makes them superior to men) in ill-fitting t-shirts with scruffy beards who spend the bulk of their time tinkering with electrical gadgetry and watching Dr. Who, and who like their rock music in direct proportion to its distance from three-chord rock. They don’t want three chords, they want three hundred! Five hundred! One thousand! One million!

Let’s get one thing straight: when I say I like The Yes Album what I really mean to say is that I like portions of The Yes Album. Because Yes, like many other progressive groups, suffers from a collective form of attention deficit disorder the effect of which is to render them incapable of sticking to one musical idea for very long. No sooner do they fall into a cool groove before they move onto another section that isn’t half as great, and so on. Rare is the song (the two-parter “All Good People” fills the bill) where they open on a beguiling note and stick with it through the entire song.

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The day you wake up and realize you like Rush is the worst day of your life, you look in the mirror and what you see is nauseating. You spend your entire life hating Rush because Rush are deplorable Prog-Libertarian/Objectivist showoffs and then you wake up one infamous morning and have to admit to yourself that you actually like Rush, or a few of their songs which is bad enough, and it’s the end of you, you’re finished, annihilated. I woke up the other day and had to admit to myself that I actually liked Rush, or at least a few of their songs, and what I saw in the mirror was hideous—a morally repugnant Mr. Hyde capable of any infamy. I looked myself in the mirror and I said, “I don’t know who you are or what you want but you’ve ruined my life.”

Fortunately (as I’ve said ad nauseam) I only like three or four of Rush’s songs, but that’s enough to make me a pariah in the circles I run in. And the only reason I like the one closest to my heart (“Closer to the Heart”) is because it’s hilariously, lovably dumb. Still, we’re talking about Rush, the humor-deprived prog-metal power trio that stormed out of the Great White North playing songs of byzantine complexity complete with Ayn Rand-addled lyrics (check out “Trees,” I dare you).

Their steadfast commitment to playing everything in the most technically complex way possible and total dedication to writing twelve-part songs (complete with Roman numerals!) was unforgivably self-indulgent, and I commend them for coming right out and admitting it in the (twelve parts complete with Roman numerals!) opus “La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self Indulgence).” I also commend bassist/keyboardist and lead castrato Geddy Lee for confessing that he had no idea whatsoever what their 1976 concept album 2112 was about. How endearing!

Unlike their more pop-oriented south-of-the-border neighbors in Kansas and Styx, Rush were the real progressive rock deal, which is to say that their commitment to complex song structures requiring Ubermensch chops rendered them pretentious beyond redemption. A definite love ‘em or hate ‘em proposition, Rush. “The most obnoxious band currently making a killing on the zonked teen circuit” wrote hater and Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau of 1977’s A Farewell to Kings.

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Remembering Lou Reed in advance of his birthdate tomorrow —Ed.

Anybody who doesn’t have a love-hate relationship with Lou Reed, well, I have to wonder about them. He was both a flawed genius and an unreconstituted pretentious asshole/nutjob, and it could be hard to separate his bat shit from his diamonds. But one LP I love unconditionally is 1976’s Coney Island Baby, on which he reveals both a pop side and a vulnerable side, and on which Reed shocked the entire world by singing about how he wanted to play football for the coach. Lou Reed? Football? To paraphrase John Fogerty, “Put me in coach/I’m ready to pay… good money for methamphetamines.”

Coney Island Baby is as close as Reed would ever come to pure pop product, and followed hard on the heels of the disappointing Lou Reed Live and the combination fiasco/fuck you that was Metal Machine Music, on which Lou let feedback do not just the heavy lifting, but all of the lifting period, before cold-bloodedly foisting off the resulting caterwaul on a defenseless public. Lou claimed there were classical references buried in all that hypnotizing squeal, but Reed spent those years as crazy as a hoot owl on one substance or another, and should you ever get the chance I recommend you read the Lester Bangs essay in which he calls Reed on Metal Machine Music, amongst other things.

Don’t get me wrong. Lou at his warmest can still be one mean character. On the otherwise catchy “Charley’s Girl,” which comes with a ready-made melody and fetching female backing vocalists, Lou warns the world to “watch out for Charley’s girl,” because she’s evidently some sort of narc, and in the middle of the song he sings, “I said if I ever see Sharon again/I’m gonna punch her face in.” Which is one catchy rhyme, but given Reed’s history of domestic abuse, was neither funny nor an idle threat.

But for the most part the melodies are friendly and easy on the ears, and there isn’t so much as a trace of the maniac/genius who gave us such harsh blasts of gritty Hubert Selby Jr. realism as “Sister Ray.” There are no extended cuts either. No, this is your radio-friendly Lou, although the radio declined to turn any of these tunes into hits. Only on the static, stutter rock classic “Kicks,” a loosey-goosey studio shuck/jam on which Lou lets us know he needs thrills in his life, does the wild man show us his avant-garde degenerate dope fiend side. With its weird vocal interjections, disjointed conversations, and general aura of studio mayhem, it has more in common with the Velvet Underground’s “Lady Godiva’s Operation” than anything else Reed would ever put on record.

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This contender for the most disappointing follow-up album ever has caught mucho flak over the years, and for good reason. It’s immensely difficult to imagine how The Rolling Stones could have topped its predecessor, 1972’s Exile on Main Street, easily one of the most brilliant rock LPs of all time. But then again the band had been one-upping themselves every time out since 1968’s Beggars Banquet, and if anyone stood a chance of besting Exile on Main Street it was the Stones.

Needless to say, 1973’s Goats Head Soup is no Exile on Main Street. Again, hardly shocking. The Stones would have had to be able to walk on water to up the ante once again. What is shocking are the precipitous drop-off in song quality and the occasionally rote and desultory performances. Goats Head Soup is not a “not as great as” proposition. Goats Head Soup is a merely good album from a band that could seemingly do no wrong and was at the height of its powers.

Worse, it was the beginning of a prolonged decline, and indeed the band’s death rattle if like me you’ve never warmed up to their “comeback” album, 1978’s Some Girls, or anything that came afterwards for that matter. Mick Jagger said at the time, “It wasn’t as vague as [Exile on Main Street] which kind of went on so long that I didn’t like some of the things. There’s more thought to this one.” “More thought”? No one ever called Mick a deep thinker.

Critical reception was mixed. Some deluded souls said it stood up against Exile on Main Street and 1971’s Sticky Fingers—victims, I suspect, of either wishful thinking or outright denial. Others weren’t so kind. Lester Bangs called it “sad.” Greg Shaw wrote that the album had “no redeeming qualities whatsoever” and then doubled down by writing there was “nothing good” about it.” The word “decadent” got bandied about a lot, and oddly enough—given the Stones’ reputation for excess—it was not meant as a compliment.

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