Monthly Archives: October 2016

Few albums have been as vilified or written off as colossal missteps as The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. There’s Taylor Swift Sings the Songs of Captain Beefheart, and Arnold Schwarzenegger Sings Barbra Streisand, but neither of these albums can hold a candle to the Stone’s 1967 answer to the Beatles’ acid-influenced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Their Satanic Majesties Request was quickly dismissed as a shameless attempt to keep up with the psychedelic Jones’s, and the critical blowback was so negative that the Stones promptly hopped to it and followed Satanic Majesties with Beggars Banquet, an LP so down to earth a filthy toilet graces its cover.

Aside from “She’s a Rainbow” and “2000 Light Years from Home” you’re highly unlikely to hear any of Satanic Majesties’ songs anywhere, and the Stones themselves haven’t had much good to say about it over the years. Keith Richards called it “a load of crap,” while Mick Jagger said “there’s a lot of rubbish” on it. But it has its fair share of cultists, whole heaps of them in fact, and they love it to death. And their waxing enthusiastic over the LP finally got the better of me. Just how bad could it be, after all?

Not bad at all is the short answer. Strange, far stranger than Sgt. Pepper for that matter, Their Satanic Majesties Request has more than its fair share of fine moments, along with a few dubious tunes that don’t quite make the grade. Me, I’ll take it over Sgt. Pepper any day, and I think the Stones should be commended for putting out an LP that was even more experimental than its Beatles counterpart. Mick and the boys took real chances on the LP, and if they didn’t always work, at least the Stones tried.

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“Vinyl brings me back to my ’80s childhood. It’s visceral—from the dusty smell of an old record jacket, to how it feels to set it on the turntable, and of course the sound! The needle, the static…the fullness of the music. The “oh sh!t, change the record!” moment of panic before the needle drops off.”

“I grew up on Beatles records from my Mom and Iron Butterfly from my Dad. I inherited a diverse collection of records from them. Motown, rock, folk. My favorites are Jefferson Airplane, George Harrison, Simon & Garfunkel, The Supremes, The Beach Boys, and the Hair soundtrack. Every Christmas we listened to Mitch Miller and the Gang’s sing along record.

As a teenager in Calumet City, IL we had Hegewisch Records—the “cool” place for music and music culture. My friends and I would go there on the record release days of our favorite bands. At the time, cassette tapes and CDs were more prevalent than vinyl… but the artwork never held up. When I think of iconic album covers, I think specifically of the vinyl versions such as the Breakfast in America cover by Supertramp and the Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. The visuals are so instant and clear in my mind.

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Okay, so in everybody’s life there comes a day so bleak that not even Joy Division can do it justice. And on that day there’s only one recourse: to crank up Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition. John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols band’s sophomore release, also known as Metal Box because it initially saw light as a metal 16mm film canister containing three 12” 45rpm records in 1979, was re-issued in 1980 as a double LP. But regardless of format it was designed to brutalize the listener with music that was as remorselessly and relentlessly down-in-the-mouth as it was utterly hypnotizing, thanks to Lydon’s deranged vocal stylings, Jah Wobble’s loping and rhythmic dub-inspired bass, and Keith Levene’s splintered and utterly unique guitar riffs. Me, I find it soothing when I’ve reached the end of my tether; it lets me know I’m not alone.

Lydon was wise to abandon punk rock; he’d said everything that needed saying in that genre and knew damn well it was a dead end. And it’s a credit to his musical knowledge—which was far more wide-ranging than anyone would have given him credit for—that he went the avant-garde dub route. Sure, the Sex Pistols posed an existential threat to everything that had come before them; but Second Edition is downright SCARY at times, and sounds every bit as demented as the Sex Pistols did menacing. Plus you could dance to it, as the band’s legendary (and hilarious) performance on American Bandstand proved.

The “death disco” (the alternative title of the song “Swan Lake”) of Second Edition marked a radical move away from the (relatively speaking) more conventional punk of 1978’s First Issue, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Lydon was not interested in making music for the masses. The band may have released two singles from the LP, but neither made any commercial concessions, and were completely representative of what critic Steve Chick described as the “cold dank, unforgiving, subterranean” nature of Second Edition in general. With the exception of “Radio 4,” a symphonic piece that is lovely really, and “Socialist,” a throbbing and fast paced instrumental that won’t give you the shivers, Second Edition never gives you a break… it wants you to suck you down into a tarpit of sound, and sink, and sink, you do.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Jo Mango – Better Lands (Live at Manchester Museum)
SASO – Stephanie
Soft Pyramids – Planes
Handgrenades – Daily Routine
Bleach Girls – Like You
Film Jacket 35 – Angkor Wat
Belinda Esquer – Silverlining
The Burgeoning – Loud Noises
Jason Gaffner – Murder In The First Degree

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Bic Runga – Close Your Eyes

Von Sell – Names
Tennyson – Your Eyes (ft. Njomza)
Gladkill – By My Side
Ty Richards – Spaceman
BOYSLASHFRIEND – Maiden Lane & Broadway (Mighty Mark & TT The Artist Remix)
L’Orange & Mr. Lif – Antique Gold (feat. Chester Watson)
Grand Pavilion – Touch
Mr. Bill – Blergh
Ronaissance & Holly – Ready
Psymbionic – A/S/L

“The early vinyl albums I remember that were crucial to me were Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles! Live! It’s a live performance at the Sunshine Festival in Hawaii in 1972. The tracks on the A side just seemed to blend into each other as one big massive percussive jam session.”

“I remember it had these incredible organ sounds, with Santana’s guitar piercing through now and again. Also the constant noise, whistles from the audience interrupted now and again by Buddy Miles vocals, and screams created a real sense of excitement. The B side was a 25 minute track with a great title called “Free Form Funkafide Filth.” The central layout was a photograph of the huge audience at the festival with crudely cutout photographs pasted on top of the various sections of both bands. It gave the impression of a massive monster band. I was also impressed by the sheer figure of Buddy Miles and his wonderful hairstyle.

There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Sly and the Family Stone was an important album for me, mainly because of two tracks “Familly Affair” and “Spaced Cowboy.” The sound was so fresh and new to me. The original front cover was pretty radical I realise now. It was a red, white, and black American flag with suns in place of the stars.

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Call it heavy metal, call it Dungeons and Dragons Rock, call it whatever you want; Ritchie Blackmore’s post-Deep Purple band Rainbow melded neo-classical rock riffs to swords and sorcery imagery to produce—especially on their sophomore release, 1976’s Rising—music that was a necessary addition to any teenage stoner’s 8-track collection. Because this shit sounded extreme, man, coming out of the open window of your bitchin’ Camaro in the high school parking lot.

Me, I was never down with Rainbow in my misspent youth, just as I was never down with Deep Purple. I thought Rising, and its predecessor 1975’s Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, were just plain dumb. But I’m here to recant. I mean, Rising IS dumb, but it also rocks balls, and at its best meets Led Zeppelin on their own terms, and holds its own. Sure, Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio’s fantasy lyrics are risible, but so are plenty of Robert Plant’s fantasy lyrics, as anybody who has ever tried to figure out exactly what “if there’s a bustle in the hedgerow don’t be alarmed now, it’s just a spring clean for the May queen” will tell you.

Having had a chance to listen to both Deep Purple and Rainbow, I can tell you I prefer the latter for several reasons. First, Rainbow kept their songs shorter; no 20 plus minute excursions for these fellas. Second, I prefer Tony Carey’s keyboards to those of Jon Lord, which I always found too heavy and intrusive. Finally, Rainbow never possessed the pure lack of introspection it took to release an album entitled Come Taste the Band. Oh, and I can’t listen to “Smoke on the Water” without wanting that “stupid with a flare gun” to fire shots into both my ears.

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In Performance, the surreal British crime drama starring Mick Jagger as the reclusive former rock star Turner and James Fox as Chas, a soldier in the east London gang of Harry Flowers, Turner says, “The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Am I right? Eh?” Right you are, Mr. Eccentric Former Rock Star, as I can attest with 100% certainty following two failed marriages featuring performances by yours truly that indeed “made it all the way.”

Performance, which was directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg in 1968 but not released until 1970, was one of the seminal motion pictures of the seventies, and went so far in the direction of Arthur Rimbaud’s “derangement of all the senses” that at a test screening in Santa Monica in 1970 the wife of a Warner Bros. executive blew the chunks fantastic, and customers had to be offered a vomit refund. It ends with Chas shooting Turner, then driving off (presumably to be murdered) by a member of the Flowers’ gang. But the face looking out the rear window could be either Chas or Turner

While Performance, with its hallucinogenic use and bi-sexuality, still has the capacity to shock the timid, it’s the film’s soundtrack, which includes songs by Mick Jagger, Randy Newman, The Last Poets, Merry Clayton, Bernard Krause & Merry Clayton, Ry Cooder (with and without Buffy St. Marie), and Jack Nitzsche (also with and without Buffy St. Marie) that retains the capacity to amaze. It’s worth owning for the Jagger (“Memo From Turner”), Newman (“Dead Gone Train”), The Last Poets (“Wake Up, Niggers”), and Ry Cooder and Buffy St. Marie (“The Hashishin”) tracks alone, to say nothing of the Ry Cooder bottleneck guitar tracks (“Get Away” and “Powis Square”).

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It’s been said that without the blues there would be no jazz, and while that’s a solid statement, just as important to the scenario is ragtime. The creators of this turn of the 20th century popular music are all long departed, but through the talents of veteran pianist Terry Waldo ragtime endures as a living art form. As the leader of assorted groups he’s been in the record business since the dawn of the 1970s, and his latest for the Tompkins Square label is an outstanding solo effort appropriately titled The Soul of Ragtime.

“I wanted some of that old, basic ragtime feeling…”
—Andrew Hill, on his composition “New Monastery”

By the early 1920s ragtime’s popularity had largely subsided. And to this day some simply consider it to be an early manifestation of the consistently developing music that overtook it, namely jazz, but it was in fact a unique entity. Along with blues and spirituals, ragtime’s impact upon the subsequent flowering of jazz is indisputable. To “rag” a tune was to syncopate it and make it more vibrant and suitable for dancing, an African-American trend that by the end of the 1800s had developed into its own genre. Even after its commercial fortunes had declined, rags remained a part of any well-rounded songster’s repertoire. Far into the 1930s, numerous guitarists later lumped into the category of country blues (Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller are two examples) employed the form as part of larger creative arsenals.

The retrospective renown of sophisticated ragtime dates back to World War II. However, its deepest appreciation came in the 1970s and mainly around the resurgence of interest in easily the genre’s most famous practitioner Scott Joplin. If ragtime was a popular music of its period, Joplin was ahead of it; his prominence while alive was based almost entirely on the 1899 publication of “The Maple Leaf Rag,” a steadily selling piece that more importantly proved influential upon the writing of many subsequent rags.

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“My father was a music lover of various tastes and was the kind of dad who would sing his favorite songs and do awkward dances in the kitchen, especially when my friends were over.”

“He would play the music from his record player and as a 10-year-old I did not like that machine, since it caused the awkward dancing! BUT, once I heard Simon & Garfunkel playing, it changed me. I would play their record over and over and I’d take it to my room and listen to my favorite songs “Cecilia” and “Sound of Silence.”

When we release our debut album in early 2017, we will be pressing up a limited amount on vinyl, in addition to releasing it online and on CD. We would love nothing more than to have music lovers discover our songs through the vinyl community, the same way I found my favorite artists as a young music lover.”
—Maria Jane Smith

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