Monthly Archives: August 2013

“My earliest memories as an infant are of sitting on my father’s lap, listening to records.”

“There were no sports in my household. There was no church. My relatives all lived in different states, so visits from Grandma and Grandpa were a rare occurrence. My upbringing, especially in my earliest years, was fairly unconventional. My parents had been baby-boom hippies who were now raising a family. My mom stayed home and my dad was a social worker. I don’t think we had a TV, but my dad had a great record collection and a killer stereo and it was on all the time.

Generally I didn’t hear the more pedestrian fare of my parents’ generation. My folks didn’t have many of the Woodstock bands or The Grateful Dead (for which I am extremely grateful!), but I think they had a copy of Sgt. Pepper and some Dylan. Rather, I was weaned on a steady diet of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and, my favorite at the time, Tom Waits.

My mother still tells the story of me at two years old, carrying around a copy of Blue Valentine and insisting it be played whenever I was in the room. Eventually they had to buy another copy because I had chewed on the jacket so much that it fell apart. I still have a vivid memory of an evening with my dad listening to, “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard,” at top volume. It was kind of scary; the snarling saxophone sounded so sinister and nasty, and Tom Waits’ bark even more so. It was thrilling. As I sit here today, recalling it gives me goose bumps.

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Mott the fookin’ ‘Oople—you gotta love ‘em. They were the first band I ever sang along with in front of the mirror, imaginary microphone in hand, checking out my rock star moves. The song was “All the Young Dudes,” of course, and the album bearing the same title belonged to my oldest brother, who was the closest thing my tiny hometown had to an actual glam rocker; he glammed up a couple of pairs of stacked-heel shoes with sky-blue paint and glitter, and actually walked around in them, which took balls in a place where shoes like that practically screamed fag and Grand Funk Railroad was considered avant-garde.

The Mott the Hoople story is legendary; they recorded four albums that didn’t do very well, mainly because they were a diffuse mix of sludgy hard rock, irksome folk, Ian Hunter’s Dylanesque musings, and covers of everyone from Little Richard to Melanie to yes, you heard me correctly, Sonny Bono. That said, LP number 3, 1971’s Brain Capers, was a real breakthrough, containing as it did such weird and wonderful numbers as “The Moon Upstairs,” “Death May Be Your Santa Claus,” and that bizarre little ditty “The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception,” not to mention a stunning cover of Dion DiMucci’s harrowing but ultimately redemptive heroin confessional, “Your Own Backyard.”

Still, the band had decided to call it quits following a disaster of a gig in an abandoned gas holder in Switzerland—you know you’re in trouble when you’re reduced to playing an abandoned gas holder anywhere–which Hunter recounts in detail in the excellent “Ballad of Mott the Hoople (26 March 1972)” off 1973’s Mott. When who should come knocking to beg them to reconsider but Ziggy Stardust himself, who as an incentive offered them first dibs on “Suffragette City,” which they turned down (!). So the Zigster sat down and wrote “All the Young Dudes” specifically for them. Said lead singer Ian Hunter, “I’d been waiting to hear something like that all my life.” The band regrouped, this time adorned in the outrageous trappings of glam.

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Those with a casual interest in late-‘60s British folk-rock might be familiar with the name Shirley Collins. Others holding a deep love for this music have likely already made the plunge into her work, the best of it being recorded with the pipe organ playing of her sister Dolly. 1968’s The Power of the True Love Knot is a perfect place to get acquainted with the traditionally focused, yet contemporarily resonant splendor of Collins’ output.

Outside of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and Scotland’s Incredible String Band, the British folk-rock boom never really gained all that much commercial traction in the United States. And while albums from those groups were pretty easy to find, particularly second-hand in American record stores for years, those acts didn’t really gain huge followings on US shores.

Included in that same scenario was Bert Jansch, both solo and in the group Pentangle, and the slow rise (and eventual explosion) of Nick Drake’s devoted following, but sadly the vast majority of additional Brit folk stuff made an even smaller impression. It took decades for names like Forest, Wizz Jones, and Trees to gather even a small non-native audience for their work, and too much prime material from that era remains seriously uncelebrated in relation to its substantial worthiness.

This circumstance extends to one of the finest singers in the entire movement, the exquisite Shirley Collins. Along with Sandy Denny and Maddy Prior (and to a lesser extent Anne Briggs and Bridget St. John), Collins brought a refreshing feminine depth to the Brit folk milieu. However, in contrast to Denny and Prior, the former a member of Fairport Convention (along with Fotheringay and an extremely useful solo career) and the latter the vocalist for Steeleye Span, Collins had an extensive background as a folk traditionalist, releasing her first recordings way back in 1959.

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Sparks: we all owe them so much. Hundreds of dollars, in fact, each and every one of us. And they expect to be paid. Just kidding. Mind you, we do owe Sparks; for being pioneers in so many subgenres of music it’s cumbersome to list them all, for writing so many brilliant songs—no one else could have written “Falling in Love With Myself Again,” “Lighten Up, Morrissey,” or the wonderful “Let the Monkey Drive”—but most of all for being perhaps the weirdest, smartest, and most consistently evolving band in the history of rock.

Since 1971 LA natives and brothers Ron (the perpetually scowling keyboardist with the mustache that has slowly morphed from Hitleresque to pencil thin like Ron himself) and Russell (the hyperactive singer with the falsetto that can shatter bulletproof glass and makes Geddy Lee sound like Ian Curtis) Mael have released 23 mind-twisting albums featuring great absurdist lyrics, wonderful melodies, and lots of great and twisted tunes like “I Married Myself” and “The Decline and Fall of Me.”

Over the past 42 (!) years they’ve done the Glam thing, the New Wave thing, the synthpop thing, the punk thing, the electronic pop/Giorgio Moroder thing—the truth is they’ve done just about everything, with the possible exception of Grunge, which they might have done had they both not fanatically despised flannel shirts.

Their latest thing—excepting 2013’s Two Hands One Mouth (Live from Europe), their first ever live LP—was the fascinating 2009 radio musical, The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, done in conjunction with Swedish public radio (obviously SPR isn’t as terminally dull as NPR), which is currently being turned into a motion picture, which I hope will feature Bergman’s character in the nude.

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