Monthly Archives: October 2016

David Lee Roth was Thee Consummate Showman of the Hair Metal era. With Roth you got the whole shmeer; a natural-born ham and song and dance man, he would gladly have set himself alight and turned flaming cartwheels over the squat Michael Anthony if that’s what it took to keep Diamond Dave in the limelight. Not for nothing did the one-man parade once say, “The world’s a stage, and I want the brightest spot.”

Diamond Dave’s fashion sense may have been deplorable (I’m looking at a photo of him wearing leopard-print spandex leotards and a chest-pelt-revealing v-neck t-shirt complete with—yes, the t-shirt—suspenders), but he more than made up for it by being rock’s preeminent komiker, or comedian. Forever “on,” and with a touch of the old-school vaudevillian in him, you got the sense Roth would have been just as comfortable playing the Borscht Belt as he was playing rock’n’roll. This made him a refreshing anomaly in a genre that depleted the world’s stockpile of hair spray yet still took itself very, very seriously. Thanks to David “I don’t feel tardy” Roth, Van Halen wasn’t just the premier hair metal band—or metal band, period, for that matter—of its time; it was the funniest one (“Have you seen Junior’s grades?”) as well.

And I suppose still is, since Roth rejoined Van Halen in 2006—21 years after departing in 1985, unhappy with the band’s pop turn, adoption of keyboards and synthesizers, and increasingly “morose” (his term) sound. During the interim the Dean Martin of Rock (what else are you going to call a guy who once quipped, “I used to jog but the ice cubes kept falling out my glass”?) released a series of increasingly less successful—grunge killed the vaudeville star—solo albums; put together a Las Vegas lounge act complete with a star-studded brass band and exotic dancers (whom Roth described as “so sweet, I bet they shit sugar”); hosted a radio show; and even worked a stint as an NYC EMT. I don’t think this was a poverty move; he probably just wanted to know how to resuscitate himself in the event of a coke-induced heart attack.

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“When I was very small, two of my greatest obsessions were the piano and the stereo. I’d pound away, and then when I was tired of that, I’d go over to the volume knob on the stereo and turn it ALL THE WAY UP. Then I’d stand and scream until someone came and turned it down. Sound has always affected me in a very physical way. Many sounds have distinct physical textures.”

“The record I remember most from those years is the Charlie Brown Christmas album. It got so much play (and probably so much handling by my grimy little fingers) that we eventually had to throw it out.

In university, one of my best friends bought a turntable at a garage sale. She was also given a complimentary Al Jarreau record. At first, we liked it mostly because we thought the front cover picture was adorable (a smirking Al in a red t-shirt—swoon!) Later, we realized that it worked musically at all three speeds—and it was the only record we listened to for several months, changing up the speed depending on our mood.

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The appearance of female blues guitarists didn’t begin with Bonnie Raitt, as she’d be the first one to tell you. There were surely a few gender trailblazers in the genre, and the most successful was Memphis Minnie. But she was no mere curiosity, possessing great ability both as a singer and string-bender, recording in four decades as a solo performer and in fine collaboration. The Arhoolie Records subsidiary Blues Classics was the first label to give her work serious attention after the end of her commercial heyday, and it’s an effort that’s still worthy of commemoration.

It can be difficult to adequately express just how crucial the Arhoolie label of Chris Strachwitz was in exploring the sheer depth of the American Music of last century, particularly the ins and outs of the blues, a form that in its raw state had become a tough sell for more commercially minded companies, especially after the innovation of the long-playing record really got its hooks in.

Strachwitz’s now celebrated imprint combined the no-nonsense DIY spirit that’s commonly associated with the contemporary “indie” experience with the urge for documentation of styles of music with essences so pure and intense that they’ve always resided on the margins. That is, they were limited in their potential for widespread “pop” success, but absolutely crucial in providing insight into how creativity could flourish and give meaning to everyday life when concerns of monetary gain weren’t a central and often overriding issue.

For instance, Arhoolie was essentially founded to annotate the discovery of a then obscure Texas musician Mance Lipscomb, a singer and guitarist that had never previously recorded. Lipscomb’s Texas Sharecropper and Songster, the first in a series of enlightening volumes of his repertoire that retain their potency to this very day, set the course for the general vibe of a massive hunk of the subsequent Arhoolie discography.

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Panic in Eden mine a sweet-spot, vintage rock vein on “Out For Blood.”

The LA-based quintet’s newest single throws down the gauntlet for other vintage rock revivalists, traversing the trail macheted by Band of Skulls and The Dead Weather. This is dangerous territory where the line between Zeppelinesque authenticity and The Darkness-like parody is very thin, but Panic in Eden prevail with their righteous indignation for the man and mind-boggling riffs which are distinctly their own.

“Out For Blood” is the first single from their forthcoming album, In The Company of Vultures, and the predatory species they reference is a direct dig on the establishment. The ten songs which comprise the LP take aim at the band’s collective disillusionment with the current state of the world and fire a blistering warning shot which essentially says “We have some serious rock ‘n’ roll here and we know how to use it.”

Tomorrow, October 20th will mark the 39th anniversary of perhaps the most tragic event in rock history; to wit, the one that deprived us of the redneck genius of one Ronnie Van Zant, just three days after Lynyrd Skynyrd released 1977’s Street Survivors. The twilight crash, which occurred in a remote forest outside McComb, Mississippi as the band was flying from Greensboro, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, also took the lives of Skynyrd guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie Gaines, a backing vocalist for the band, as well as the lives of the pilots and assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick.

Lynyrd Skynyrd lives on, not so much in the form of the band bearing their name that still roams the land playing meat and potatoes rock (minus the meat) for the faithful hungry enough to settle for poor seconds, but on their records, which sound just as fresh today as they did back in the seventies. People who write off Lynyrd Skynyrd as being just a band of dumb rednecks should remember that southern man don’t need them ‘round anyhow, and would also be well advised to remember this shocking truth: Lynyrd Skynyrd was both a populist sensation and a critic’s band. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau never tired of singing their praises, and Greil Marcus ranked their demise as the No. 1 rock tragedy of the 1970s, the decade that cost us Janis, Jimi, and Jim, to say nothing of Elvis. As Christgau once said of Van Zant: “Dumb he ain’t.”

Take the title track of 1976’s Gimme Back My Bullets, on which the guy who hated Saturday night specials seems to be demanding his ammunition back. It’s a ferocious track, and Ronnie sounds like an ornery advocate for the National Rifle Association, that is until you learn he wasn’t referring to real bullets, but to the bullets that Billboard magazine used to put before chart entries for songs that sold a million copies. As for the guitar work it’s every bit as ornery as Ronnie himself, and the track is a classic. The same goes for the relatively overlooked “Every Mother’s Son,” a lovely tune with a great chorus and a couple of guitar solos that will make you forget all about Ed King, the Yankee-born Skynyrd guitarist who jumped ship after 1975’s Nuthin’ Fancy. Hell, J. Mascis liked “Every Mother’s Son” so much he recorded a cover over it.

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After departing the group Spirit, guitarist Randy California knocked out an underrated and underheard covers-centric solo album Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds. While not a masterpiece, it still provided a solid chunk of early hard rock action, and the disparate nature of those cover tunes also did a fine job of blurring the divisions that can result from over-strident genre categorization.

When the discussion comes around to the topic of the great Los Angeles bands of the late-‘60s (and with the right combo of stamina and substances the talking will arrive at that destination much sooner than a person might think), it’s sort of a no-brainer that The Byrds will be awarded their just due and such worthy names as The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Love, and even Capt. Beefheart & His Magic Band will have their moments of appreciation.

But you’ll know the conversation is fortified with good company if somebody stands up to stump for the cause of Spirit, a fine bit of discernment that will directly relate to that band’s truly unusual mixture of rock, jazz, psych, and pop influences. And it was a blend that proved fairly popular at the time; all four of the LPs by the original five-piece lineup hit the Billboard Top 100 Album Chart, and all four are mandatory purchases for those curious over the serious-minded American rock music of the period.

The records are Spirit (#31) and The Family That Plays Together (#22) both from 1968, Clear (#55) from ’69 and Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (#63) from ’70, and the membership of the initial incarnation was guitarist/vocalist Randy California, drummer Ed Cassidy, keyboardist John Locke, bassist Mark Andes and percussionist/vocalist Jay Ferguson. And anyone impressed by the above quartet of albums by this unique quintet should investigate their soundtrack to French director Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, unreleased at the time but given a nice LP issue by the ever dependable Sundazed concern back in 2005.

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One of the first great electric blues LPs is titled I’m Jimmy Reed, and it’s loaded with twelve songs from one of the 1950s only true blues crossovers. Over half a century later it still holds up spectacularly well and additionally provides a solid contrast to the electrified delta sounds that poured out of the studio Chess during the same period.

Jimmy Reed’s blues is amongst the most accessible ever recorded in either the acoustic or electric permutations of the form. Master of a relaxed, natural style lacking in the rough edges that his contemporaries Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker utilized with prideful relish, Reed’s stellar run of sides for the Vee-Jay label displayed how in the bustling post-WWII urban environment the blues could represent more than the power of the plantation transmogrified after traveling up the Mississippi River (Muddy, Wolf, etc.) or the horn-laden high strains of citified sophistication (Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Tiny Bradshaw, Willie Mabon).

In contrast to Muddy, who instigated a booming ensemble sound that while impressively groundbreaking completely on its own terms would also prove an essential component in rock music’s ‘60s growth spurt, Reed was somewhat closer to the norm of a “folk-blues” player, offering up simple and often insanely catchy guitar figures and an unfussy, plainly sung (some might say sleepy) vocal approach with accents of trilling rack harmonica.

This shouldn’t infer that Reed engaged in any forced gestures of aw-shucks down-home authenticity, at least not in what’s considered his prime. Hell, one glimpse at the picture on I’m Jimmy Reed’s back cover presents a man of top-flight refinement and truly choice threads, and his image intersected with the sound of his records extremely well.

To some extent less celebrated than those abovementioned Chess bluesmen as a key factor in the development of rock, Reed appears in retrospect to be equally if not more influential, both in terms of the user-friendly simplicity of his template, for he was adapted by blues rockers, garage bands, folkies, psyche merchants, and even a few punkers, and in the sheer number of prominent covers; Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Them, Grateful Dead, Steve Miller (no surprise), and four times by Bill Cosby (a surprise), and that’s just for starters.

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The Vinyl Guide is a weekly podcast for fans and collectors of vinyl records. Each week is an audio-documentary on your favourite records, often including interviews with band members and people who were part of the project.

It’s hosted by Nate Goyer, a self-described vinyl maniac who enjoys listening to records and sharing the stories behind them. Despite his Yankee accent, Nate lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife, 2 kids, and about 1,500 records. (But only about 1,000 of them his wife knows about.)

The Vinyl Guide takes records one by one, telling the tale of how they came to be, why the work is important, and then shares how collectors can tell one pressing from another. Learn more at the TheVinylGuide.com or simply subscribe via iTunes or RSS feed.

Holy bejeesus look who’s on the show—Fat Mike from NOFX, Me First & the Gimme Gimmes, and of course head honcho at Fat Wreck Chords—the famed independent punk label—drops by to talk about his history, running FatWreck.com for 25+ years, shares some road stories, and discusses the new NOFX record First Ditch Effort. Also included is the new NOFX track “6 Years On Dope.”

The union of political subject matter and music can surely make for a problematic, sometimes even dysfunctional relationship, but the occasions where the results actually work are cause for celebration. Unsurprisingly, much of the good stuff sitting at the big crossroads of social issues and song sprang forth from the 1960s, and one of the best protest singer-songwriters of the era was Phil Ochs. His music shines great illumination upon the tumultuousness of that decade, but in its specificity to concerns of its period it also manages to present a somewhat discomforting commentary on the present.

For as long as I’ve been cognizant of Phil Ochs, he’s been identified as a tragic figure. This reflects upon how undiagnosed sickness and a troublesome final act to an eventful life can cast a shroud over prior achievements that are quite substantial and worthy of praise. And the fact that he was a success as a topical folk artist who never really transcended the realm of modest renown to become a household name (ala some of his contemporaries) only contributes to the grimness that surrounds his story. Add in that, Ochs’ attempts to move beyond the constraints of folk-based protest persist in being underrated and the downbeat mood of the man’s life narrative is secure.

Phil Ochs committed suicide by hanging on April 9, 1976 after suffering a long period of depression, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism, and his self-inflicted death has often been linked to the creeping malaise that transpired in the ‘70s after the fallout of stumbled progressiveness that ended the previous decade. While denying this symbolic resonance is surely a mistake, it’s also true that wallowing in the difficulties of Ochs’ later years reduces him to an artist of fleeting productivity that was victimized by life’s struggles and ultimately died a failure.

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