Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Graded on a Curve: Taylor Swift,
1989

Well now that Taylor Swift is in cahoots with Joe Biden to rig this coming Sunday’s Super Bowl in favor of boyfriend Travis Kelce’s team the Kansas City Chiefs in what one conservative pundnut has called a “psyop,” and the right-wingnut lunatics who despise her for endorsing Democrats and presumably turning their innocent little girls into brainwashed pop music trollops are crawling all over one another to issue doomsday predictions should this vile and sinister plot succeed, with one shithouse-crazy rat of a commentator by the name of Rogan O’Handley even going so far as to bluntly warn that a Chiefs victory will result in, I kid you not, World War III and millions of innocent deaths, it seems as good a time as any to say that Swift is hardly Leo Rothstein (remember the 1919 Black Sox!) but rather a pop phenomenon and powerful cultural influencer possessed of immense talent and charm. I like her. I like her music. And I hope she is part of some sinister cabal to rig the Super Bowl. I love a good deep-state conspiracy. And I hate the San Francisco Giants.

Swift, as everybody who hasn’t lived under a rock since 2006 or so knows, began her career as a country artist before moving popwards and ultimately diving into the deep end of the synth-pop pool with 2014’s 1989. This led her to both immense popularity and cult status, with her fans, known as Swifties, hanging on her every last word, lyric, song, album, fashion choice, and romantic imbroglio, the last of which she often refers to in her songs.

Adulation has come with a good bit of slut-shaming and stalking—she was a real asshole magnet before she became the target of conservatives, most of whom are terrified of her because she has an enormous base and could actually entice them into voting, because the last thing the right-wingers in our fair nation want is young people voting. They tend to vote for the wrong sorts, namely politicians who aren’t members in good standing of the ever-growing lunatic wing of the Republican party.

Swift’s appeal is easy to understand. She’s bright, charismatic, has a great voice, writes catchy pop confections, and isn’t Charlie Daniels. And she’s not afraid to take musical risks, as she did with 1989. And they’ve paid off—1989 has gone nine-times platinum, which I think translates to sales of three billion copies, although I’m terribly bad at math. The country folks may not have liked it, although I’m betting many happily followed her into synth-pop territory. Her true fans, I’m guessing, would follow her anyway. If she were to collaborate with Laibach, or the ghost of Pol Pot for that matter, they’d be there to cheer her on.

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Graded on a Curve: Mötley Crüe,
Dr. Feelgood

Celebrating Vince Neil on his 63rd birthday.Ed.

When the news circulated about my sex tape with Pamela Anderson I went into a panic. What would my mother think? Then it came out that the sex tape in question featured Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not so my mom. She called me in a huff and said “Here’s your chance to make something of yourself and you blow it. How am I going to face the ladies at my bridge club? Did you even have sex with the woman?” “I don’t think so,” I admitted. “I fell asleep while watching Baywatch and one thing led to another.”

Critics have been sniping at Mötley Crüe for decades. In a review of 1984’s Shout at the Devil the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau wrote “It’s hardly news that this platinum product is utter dogshit even by heavy metal standards,” but then Christgau’s an elitist and hates Guns N’ Roses too. God knows it’s easy to mock Mötley Crüe, both for their brand of hair metal and their fashion sense; their hair spray budget come the release of 1989’s Dr. Feelgood was $98,000 per week, and they were responsible for one-quarter of the world’s spandex sales. Without Mötley Crüe, many of Peru’s spandex farmers would have starved.

The important question when it comes to Dr. Feelgood is simple: Does it have a reason to exist? I would say yes. Vince Neil (vocals), Mick Mars (lead guitars), Nikki Sixx (bass and keyboards), and the aforementioned Tommy Lee collectively have the intelligence of a Cuban water rat, and their misogyny grows tiresome very quickly, but there’s no question they’re a top notch metal band. And a few of the songs on Dr. Feelgood—their first LP after being weaned from every mind-altering substance on planet Earth, as well as several they had to have shipped in special delivery from other regions of the galaxy—are well worth owning.

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Graded on a Curve:
The Sensational
Alex Harvey Band,
Next

Remembering Alex Harvey, born on this day in 1935.Ed.

What the fuck is this? Glam hangers-on The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were a uniquely Scottish phenomenon, trainspotting and pronouncing the word “garage” the way Elton John does in his song “Levon.” Which is just another way of saying that hardly anybody in the U.S. of A. outside of Cleveland ever laid ears on ‘em, much less considered ‘em sensational.

And small wonder, because the Sensational Alex Harvey Band were simply too esoteric gonzo in the grand tradition of unapologetic English eccentrics for mass consumption. Pub rock heroes with progressive rock tendencies who weren’t afraid to shamelessly camp it up for the Glitter kids, SAHB liked to keep the punters guessing, as 1973’s Next demonstrates.

On the band’s sophomore LP you get some Mott rock, a faux-snakeskin swamp blues, an esoteric hoodoo jive number called “Vambo Marble Eye,” some straight-up Glam Rock, and a couple of numbers so completely over the top flamboyant they make David Bowie and Gary Glitter look like wallflowers. Fact is I’ve never heard anything like ‘em outside the canons of Jobriath, Meatloaf, and Morrissey.

All of which to say is that Alex Harvey and Company were some twisted people, as their madcap live shows proved. Superhero costumes, props, you name it–these anything goes eclectitions (a word I just made up!) put every bit as much outré energy into their stage act as Alice Cooper or Jethro Tull, and their fanatical UK cult following adored them for it.

The LP opens on a cheesy blues note with piano stomper “Swampsnake”–on which Harvey plays some very ornery harmonica and does some serious over-emoting–before taking a very “whatever were they thinking?” wrong turn with “Gang Bang,” which sounds like your standard Mott the Hoople pub rocker but flunks every known morality test with its chorus “Ain’t nothing like a gang bang/To blow away the blues.”

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Graded on a Curve:
The Legendary
Stardust Cowboy, Paralyzed

Where to begin the saga of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy? Well, outer space—which is where some are convinced he had his beginnings, although let the record reflect that he was born Norman Carl Odam in Lubbock Texas, where he grew up and which he so hated he never went back—is as good as place as any.

Seems back in 1973 some braniac at NASA got the bright idea to rouse the astronauts in space by playing “the Ledge’s” brilliantly awful (and awfully brilliant) “Paralyzed.” Trouble is it left them so discombobulated there was fear they’d lose their minds and set the controls for the sun, which led NASA to promptly put the kibosh on the practice. Any half-assed song can get itself banned in Boston. “Paralyzed” is the only song to ever be banned in space.

And speaking of the Great Out There, everybody’s favorite Space Oddity David Bowie was a fan, and even went so far as to slap a cover of LSD’s “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” on 2002’s Heathens. And where do you think Ziggy got that “Stardust”? That’s right. From the bugle-playing maniac with no apparent sense of rhythm and melody and a singing style that can only be described as enthusiastically deranged.

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy has been called a pioneer of the “psychobilly” movement, but let the evidence show that despite his apparent derangement, the artist formerly known as Norman Carl Odam went on to become a productive member of society working as a private contractor for, you guessed it, NASA. Although he still occasionally takes his show on the road, generally with a rotating band of admiring indie notables backing him up under the name the Altamont Boys. The Lonesome Stardust Cowboy is not devoid of a twisted sense of humor.

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Graded on a Curve:
The Hollies,
The Hollies’ Greatest Hits

Celebrating Graham Nash on his 82nd birthday.Ed.

When it comes to scrumptious English pop confections, it’s hard to top the fluff produced by The Hollies on the Epic and Imperial labels during the mid-sixties. While their contemporaries were producing big psychedelic statements, these Mancunian lads were whipping up irresistible little ditties that were pure froth. “Carrie Anne” is one of the most innocent and loving slices of pure popcraft ever recorded.

And 1973’s The Hollies’ Greatest Hits offers a wonderful–if inherently limited–overview of the Hollies’ not-so-grand ambitions. These proud lightweights adhered like superglue to the format of the 3-minute pop song–“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” is a serious outlier at 4 minutes, 19 seconds–but they knew how to make those 3 minutes count. A whole hell of lot happens in “Dear Eloise,” and the deliriously dizzy-making “On a Carousel” contains gorgeous multitudes. When it comes to great songwriting teams, the names of Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks, and Graham Nash should never be forgotten.

It goes without saying that this compilation will not appeal to existentialists, hard rockers, or people who recoil at the word “cute.” That said, the LP doesn’t play up the cute as much as it might have. I can certainly understand why such post-Nash compositions as 1969’s heavy-on-the-soul “He Ain’t Heavy,” 1972’s lovely but lugubrious “Long Dark Road,” and that same year’s surprisingly hard rocking “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” are included herein, but they don’t feel much at home; a comp that focused solely on the Nash-era Hollies would sound more of a piece, and would provide more pure pop pleasure to people looking for frothy pop thrills.

I also wish this greatest hits didn’t jump back and forth in time in a craven effort to put the more recognizable hits up front; side two starts with a song from 1969 followed by three songs from 1967, then fast forwards to two songs from 1972. But hey, that’s show business, and I can only presume that the folks who put the comp together–and omitted some great U.K.-only hits in the process–knew best.

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Graded on a Curve:
War,
Greatest Hits

Thanks to Long Beach, California’s War we can all—no matter our race, color, creed, or sexual orientation—be instant Chicanos: just add “Low Rider.” I was a pasty-faced kid growing up in the sticks, but when “Low Rider” came on the dashboard FM my dad’s decommissioned gas company truck was instantly transformed into a flamingo pink 1964 Chevrolet Impala with wire-spoke wheels, whitewall tires, and a bitchin’ hydraulic system perfect for slow-bucking my way down the nighttime streets of the imaginary barrio that was my whiter than Wonder Bread-with-the-edges-cut-off hometown.

With their hardcore funk grooves, which they spiced up with liberal dollops of rock, jazz, Latin, rhythm and blues, and reggae, the multi-ethnic lineup of War created a sound that has been labeled “progressive soul.” Here’s keyboardist/vocalist Leroy “Lonnie” Jordan on the band’s sound: “It was all one big salad bowl. That’s one of the reasons why Jerry (Goldstein, the band’s producer) didn’t know what to do with us. We didn’t even understand what we were doing…” Well, maybe they didn’t, but confusion has rarely sounded so good—War offered a giddy-making and exotic addition to the, er, very pale soundtrack of my teen years. I may have dug Elton John’s “Grow Some Funk of Your Own,” but thanks to War I didn’t have to—they may have been sending out missives from a world I couldn’t even begin to understand, but the envelopes they were in were funkadelic.

War got their start with mad dog and Englishman Eric Burdon, the former lead singer of The Animals, with whom they released two 1970 albums and scored a hit with “Spill the Wine.” But Burdon was gone that same year and you won’t find any Burdon-era music on 1976’s Greatest Hits. Rather, it collects songs from their pair of 1971 releases, War and the far more successful All Day Music, 1972’s wildly successful The World Is a Ghetto (Billboard magazine’s Album of the Year as the best-selling album of 1973!), 1973’s Deliver the Word, and 1975’s Why Can’t We be Friends?

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Graded on a Curve:
X,
Los Angeles

Celebrating Exene Cervenka, born on this day in 1956.Ed.

When it comes to LA punk, nobody played it with such urgency and fuck-you desperation as X. Everybody on the LA punk scene may have been a nihilist, but only X could open a vein and let you see how it felt to bleed, and show you how Hollywood was, in one famous guy’s immortal words, “a tour through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.”

Exene Cervenka’s great punk poetry and wild cat yowl, which meshed in a wonderfully off-kilter way with John Doe’s deep pipes, Billy Zoom’s hyperactive rockabilly guitar, and D.J. Bonebrake’s pounding rhythms all contributed to make X the first LA punk band to make a reputation for itself on both coasts. They were smarter, and seemingly more personal, than their LA compatriots. Black Flag dealt in satire, as did Fear, but X gave you the impression that they weren’t joking around, and were really on the down and outs: “We’re desperate,” they sang, “Get used to it.” Only Darby Crash, who burned himself down like a mad farmer might his own cornfield, could even come close.

They were pissed and not just at society; “The Phone’s Off the Hook, but You’re Not” is strictly personal, as is “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss.” And thanks to the production and contributions on organ of ex-Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, they even had a wider palate than their cohorts on the scene, at least on their debut 1980 LP, the great Los Angeles—a title that let everybody else know X was putting dibs on the city of motels, money, murder, and madness, to quote the Lizard King who once ruled the Hollywood scene.

Los Angeles is frequently an ugly album, coupling as it does unremittingly catchy melodies with lyrics that unflinchingly explore the dark underbelly of the City of Damned Angels. With the exception of their wonderfully speeded-up take on The Doors’ “Soul Kitchen,” on which Cervenka and Doe sing in demented synch, and “The Unheard Music,” a screed about the radio punk blacklist (“Some smooth chords on the car radio/No hard chords on the radio”), Los Angeles is a non-stop sleazefest.

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Graded on a Curve: Humble Pie,
Eat It

Remembering Steve Marriott, born on this day in 1947.Ed.

When it comes to most 1970s double LPs, you can count me out. Especially the live ones. Bands almost inevitably saw them as an opportunity to stretch out, and engage in long, boring, and masturbatory free form shenanigans. Whole sides given over to one song! And in some cases, such as The Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach and Canned Heat’s Living the Blues, TWO sides dedicated to one song! But look on the bright side. Should you ever decide you want out of this world, all you’ll have to do is put on Canned Heat’s 41-minute version of “Refried Boogie,” and presto! Suicide by ennui.

England’s Humble Pie was as guilty as the rest. On the band’s 1971 double live LP Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, Steve Marriott and company dedicated whole album sides to both Dr. John’s “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” and Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone.” Rockin’ the Fillmore is not so much an album as a tar pit, perfect for sinking slowly into on Seconal, Nembutals, and all the other great downers that made the seventies the Decade of Drool. I did my fair share and they were fun, especially when it came to basic motor skills, so much fun indeed that I once attempted to force a forkful of spaghetti into my forehead.

But Humble Pie redeemed itself with the 1973 double LP Eat It, because (1) I spent a lot of time listening to it as a kid, (2) there was simply no beating front man Steve Marriott—the legendary former guitarist and vocalist for The Small Faces—when he was at the top of his game, and most importantly (3) only one of its four sides is live. Amazing! Not a 40-minute track to be found! And what’s more its mix of hard rock originals, quieter numbers, jacked-up soul classics, and good old hippie blooz inexplicably works, thanks to the wonderfully grainy voice of Marriott—one of rock’s most unheralded lead singers—three of the greatest backup singers ever, and a band proficient enough to master songs from any genre under the sun.

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Graded on a Curve:
The Dictators,
Go Girl Crazy!

Celebrating Handsome Dick Manitoba on his 70th birthday.Ed.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but LPs? A whole different story. One glance at the cover of The Dictators’ 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!—which features roadie turned singer and “Secret Weapon” Handsome Dick Manitoba hamming it up in a wrestling outfit and a 200-watt smile, resplendent in Jewfro and dark sunglasses, an outrageous red glitter jacket bearing his name hanging from a gym locker nearby—and you know you’re in the presence of something truly outrageous and great.

Oh, how I love The Dictators. The New Yawk proto-punkers may have produced only one brilliant LP, namely Go Girl Crazy! (which sold like shit), but talk about influential; you can draw a direct line between it to The Ramones and straight to The Beastie Boys. All three bands have the same smartass “fight for your right to party” punk attitude; they all deliver tons of snotty and hilarious one-liners; and they all use great guitar riffs to deliver the goods. If The Ramones (who later did a version of “California Sun” off Go Girl Crazy!) and The Beastie Boys didn’t cop their entire shtick from The Dictators’ debut, I’m Michael Bolton, mulleted version.

But to be honest I don’t give a shit whether Go Girl Crazy! was the Sgt. Pepper of proto-punk and the Rosetta Stone for hundreds of bands that came later. All that matters to me is that Go Girl Crazy! is one of the rockingest, funniest, and most gleeful albums ever made. And it’s good-natured, too. I used the word “snotty” above, but The Dictators are a friendly lot, and as a result get away with a lot. You would expect songs like “Master Race Rock” and “Back to Africa” to be prime examples of the deliberate punk outrage, but both turn out to be just the opposite of what they appear to be, namely funny and friendly. Why, these guys don’t even swear; co-lead vocalist Andy “Adny” Shernoff says “heck!”

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Graded on a Curve:
Molly Hatchet,
Super Hits

Jacksonville, Florida’s Molly Hatchet released their self-titled debut LP in September 1978, less than a year after the plane carrying hometown heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd glided, gas tanks on empty, into a swamp outside Gillsburg, Mississippi, and more than anyone else they carried that band’s brand of Southern Rock into the future.

Over the course of the six albums (although the first two stand head and shoulders above the rest) they recorded during their peak—well maybe I should five, because their last one, 1984’s The Deed Is Done is a mostly a sorry spectacle—they produced a small but respectable body of songs that would have made Ronnie Van Zant proud. They were never Skynyrd’s equal—not a rock band in America was—but as the songs on 1998’s Super Hits (I love cheesy best-of compilations) prove, they learned from the best, and what’s more had a few tricks up their sleeve that their star-crossed forebearers didn’t.

The band’s history is complicated by the fact that their grit and grits lead singer Danny Joe Brown, who exuded pure swamp charisma, left the band after the band’s second LP (1979’s excellent Flirtin’ with Disaster) and didn’t return until the band’s fifth (1983’s No Guts…No Glory) and his replacement, Jimmy Farrar, simply didn’t have the same fire in the belly. And the compilation itself is flawed for the reason I stated above—when a band releases two tremendous albums and the compilers are left with having to include cuts from the other, lesser albums, you’re left to do some sorry compromising.

And it’s actually worse than that—I’ll be damned if I can understand why they only include the title track of 1979’s Flirtin’ with Disaster on the compilation while ignoring other great songs from the album like “Whiskey Man” and “Boogie No More,” while including two tracks from the largely lamentable The Deed Is Done. I’d blame it on bad moonshine, but the corporate types at Epic Records hardly seem your standard white lightning types.

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Graded on a Curve:
Thin Lizzy,
Jailbreak

Celebrating Brian Downey in advance of his 73rd birthday tomorrow.Ed.

You wanna hear a miracle? I lived for almost five-and-a-half decades without ever hearing Jailbreak, or any other Thin Lizzy album for that matter. Here vocalist/bassist and chief songwriter Phil Lynott and his Irish compatriots put out a truly tremendous LP in America’s Bicentennial Year, not to mention a parcel of other great LPs, and what was I doing? Listening to Elton John and John Denver and England Dan and John Ford Coley, any band basically with a guy named John in it. If Debbie Gibson’s middle name been John, I would have listened to her too.

I would love to be able to say I simply wasn’t into hard rock back then, but I owned albums by Bad Company, UFO (UFO? Me? Inexplicable!), Robin Trower, and Foghat, so that’s sheer bunk. But there’s no point in crying over guilty milk, and it’s never too late to make up for past mistakes, that is unless you’re Lee Harvey Oswald or that chimpanzee (name: Travis) who ripped a woman’s face off in 2009, and I’m neither of those personages.

So here I am making up for atoning for my inexplicable oversight, and listening to Jailbreak which mixes tremendous twin-guitar hard rockers with sweeter fair, all of which I love with the possible exception of “Cowboy Song”—in which Lynott, a black Irishman, plays rodeo cowpoke.

But I take that back. “Cowboy Song” may start slowly, but its guitar solos are tremendous and Lynott’s vocals are impassioned (especially when he sings, “It’s okay amigo/Just let me go/Riding in the rodeo”) and the jam at song’s end is a bono fido guitar marvel. Turns out I love the damn thing! Just as I love everything about the LP, except for its cover. Too sci-fi for my decidedly earthbound tastes.

Thin Lizzy was founded in 1969 in Dublin by two former members of Van Morrison’s Them and two members of the band Orphanage (which reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s quip about orphans, to wit: “To lose one parent is misfortune; to lose two parents is sheer carelessness.”). The band moved permanently to London in 1971, and recorded their eponymous debut LP that same year.

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Graded on a Curve:
Gary Burton,
The Groovy Sound
of Music

I have never seen a musical situation so dismal that it couldn’t be made worse by the arrival of a vibraphone. Its insufferably bright, chipper, and laid-back tones are, to people (like myself) with highly strung nervous systems, a form of Chinese water torture. I recently watched a mid-seventies Frank Zappa concert on television and my chief takeaway was that Frank Zappa is a pretentious, smirking twit, which to be honest I already knew. But, and this is important, it was Ruth Underwood’s “vibes” that made me turn the television off. I thought I was going to go mad.

The vibraphone is—and this is a gross simplification—a motorized advance on the marimbas, and dates back to the mid-Twenties. And the demoralizing thing is that when I wrote about my hate for the instrument on Facebook numerous people wrote to tell me I was full of shit, which naturally led me to the conclusion that I have a more highly developed sense of musical taste than they do.

To me vibraphonists are committing a hate crime in the name of art by means of felt-tipped mallets, and the terrible fact, the unconscionable fact, is that they are destroying lives with their felt-tipped mallets, which they invariably use in a “cool jazz” context that is anathema to anyone who prefers their jazz loud, hard, and preferably free. For people such as yours truly vibraphonists with their felt-tipped mallets are not musicians at all but rather the producers of a sound that leads inevitably to universal moral decay and from universal moral decay to insanity and imbecility and ultimately to the end of everything. But perhaps I exaggerate.

The list of notable vibraphone criminals is a long one, and includes such hallowed names as Red Norvo, Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Cal Tjader, and Bobby Hutcherson. But the most ruthless and lacking in pity for the unutterable suffering of humanity is Gary Burton. Burton is an innovative giant of the instrument, in so far as he was the first vibraphonist to realize that he could double the pain he was inflicting on the feckless ears of the world by wielding four mallets (in what has been described as a “pianistic technique” inspired by pianist Bill Evans) instead of two. And to add to his resume as a bad human being he is also credited as one of the founders of jazz fusion.

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Graded on a Curve:
Van Halen,
Women and Children First

Remembering Eddie Van Halen in advance of his birthdate tomorrow.Ed.

What to say about the passing of Eddie Van Halen? Sad? Tragic? Heartbreaking? If the words are trite ones, it’s because death is the mother of a vast brood of cliches. What I’ll carry with me forever is his impish grin in the video for “Jump.” Can a smile sum up a man’s life? It’s the smile of a show-off making it look easy when you know damn well it isn’t, but there’s nothing smug about it. He’s simply bequeathing us a gift, the giving of which makes him happy. As for the fireworks he produced with his guitar, they speak for themselves.

I fell in love with Van Halen as a result of that video, which many–including my lovely other half–view as a sell-out. But the song’s sheer exuberance won me over, and led me to do something I would never have done otherwise–go back and listen to, and fall in love with, the band’s earlier albums.

One of said albums is 1980’s Women and Children First, which I put in third place in the Van Halen discography behind their self-titled 1978 debut and 1984’s 1984. On Women and Children First Pasadena’s greatest ever metal band pulverize the competition–Eddie shows off his hair-raising chops while David Lee Roth does his patented Borscht Belt shtick, and drummer Alex Van Halen and bass player Michael Anthony make like a steamroller with swing. In short, it’s business as usual.

The LP’s two opening tracks are its best. “And the Cradle Will Rock” is one of the heaviest songs in the Van Halen catalogue–less blitzkrieg than juggernaut, it boasts (as do the other songs) a guitar solo I’m sure has led many a lesser guitarist to take up the tuba, and a message (“Well, they say it’s kinda frightnin’/How this younger generation swings”) that’s resounded the whole way back to the origins of rock ’n’ roll and beyond.

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Graded on a Curve: Jackson Browne,
Hold Out

In my dream Jackson Browne approaches me, drenched in turquoise and denim, a pretender bearing precious gifts I do not want. Jackson says unto me, “I am the conscious of my generation. The anatomist of the Me Generation, of their lost dreams and pretenses and soul-killing emptiness. I sing about Yuppies—have you heard about them?—for yuppies, and my music is sweet and sad and let’s face it a tad bit boring. Here’s a song called “Disco Apocalypse.” Take it. The end is nigh.”

Jackson Browne wasn’t the best of the seventies El Lay folk and country rock crop. He certainly wasn’t its sharpest social observer—I would grant that honor to Don Henley (yeah, that’s right) or Joni Mitchell. He’s always been far too cerebral, too inward looking. He’s a serious man, and a philosopher of sorts, and a pessimistic one at that. His “The Pretender,” with its hollow men leading affluent lives of quiet desperation, is proof.

But then again the LA musical community was awash in pessimists. They knew they had it good and they took full advantage of the fact—hedonism was the order of the day—but they also knew they were living in a dystopia called the Hotel California. And Lord knows he’s never been the City of Angels’ most charismatic artist—Mr. Excitement he ain’t. No, he is (and I’m not undermining his gifts) a craftsman of solid but hardly supercharged songs played with consummate skill by a superb cast of supporting musicians. The man has always known how to put together a great band.

Browne was on a streak when he released 1980’s Hold Out. He’d released the excellent The Pretender in 1976 and followed it up with the iconic live album Running on Empty the following year, and both cemented his early promise as a songwriter to be contended with. He was no thriller, and he was a humorless git, but he had his finger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist—of the Me Generation putting away childish things like countercultural community and settling down to the job of getting rich.

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Graded on a Curve: Manfred Mann’s
Earth Band,
The Roaring Silence

On 1976’s The Roaring Silence Manfred Mann’s Earth Band leaves Earth behind in a progressive rock-et ship powered by pure synthesizer shlock. You can call the results abominable—I do—but they’re also entertaining in an over-the-top pop prog way.

The Manfred Mann Earth Band directed their low-rent, high-energy version of progressive rock at the kids in the cheap seats, and I’m betting the kids loved it. The Earth Band weren’t as technically proficient as Yes, as rigidly neoclassical (although they have their mortifying moments) as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or as austere and melodically sophisticated as Pink Floyd. The closest comparison is to The Alan Parsons Project. The music on The Roaring Silence isn’t half as smart, subtle, and sophisticated as it thinks it is, but that’s part of its sick charm. This is art rock for people with no appreciation for good art. It’s dumb. Very dumb. So dumb I sometimes find myself rooting for it.

By the time the Manfred Mann Earth Band got around to recording The Roaring Silence they’d gone through numerous other phases, including one during which they seemed to think they were the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And Mann and Company’s cosmo-futurist jazz leanings linger on here, united, alas, with depressing and sometimes inadvertently hilarious results, to the classical past in the form of the music of Schubert, Stravinsky, and Philip Hayes, whoever the hell he is. (They’d had the same intentions on 1973’s Solar Fire, so it’s not as if they were on to something completely novel and horrific.)

So yeah. If an unholy fusion of space jazz and classical music filtered through the pop (and populist) sensibility of the British Invasion veteran who gave us “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and some cool Dylan and Springsteen covers is your idea of a good time, The Roaring Silence could be your cup of progressive shlock. If not you’re in for some very real pain and suffering, bookended by the Earth Band’s pair of Springsteen covers, “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirits in the Night,” although you’ll only get the second if you buy the 1998 re-issue of the album.

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