Monthly Archives: June 2017

It was the best of Lou; it was the worst of Lou. I’m talking, of course, about Lou Reed’s infamous 1978 “comedy” album, Live: Take No Prisoners, which was recorded over a 4-day period at the Bottom Line in New York City. On it Mr. Velvet Underground adlibs all over some of his best-known songs, launching into long, meandering, and only occasionally humorous digressions that destroy said songs in the process. You will like this album if you believe Lou Reed is the second coming of Lenny Bruce. Me, I rate him more along the lines of Lenny and Squiggy.

But here’s the good news. Despite Reed’s best efforts to hobble his own material by free-associating right over it, Live: Take No Prisoners occasionally reaches sublime heights, thanks to some ballsy and unique arrangements that actually—at least at times—improve on the studio originals. Unlike Bob Dylan—whose radical rearrangements of his classics tend to give me the shudders—Reed has the ability to treat his own songs with arch irreverence and get away with it. Sometimes at least.

I could belabor the point I make in the first paragraph, but I’ll try not to. Suffice it to say that the almost 17 minutes of “Walk on the Wild Side” are truly insufferable. He chit chats for a while, then goes into a long spiel about how he came to write the song. He then interrupts said long spiel with a rant about how much he loathes the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau and rock critics in general before returning to his original spiel, having also taken a brief conversational detour to give a shout out to Bruce Springsteen who is in the audience. “Sweet Jane” receives similar treatment—Lou yaks his way through it, looking for yuks with his Barbra Streisand imitation and his observation that people from Wyoming are short (guess you had to be there). Meanwhile the band vamps behind him, vainly hoping—along with, I would guess, the audience—that he’ll just shut up and play the damn song. I know that’s what I’d have been hoping.

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Tompkins Square continues to rescue neglected independent releases from the cruel clutches of obscurity. The latest: William C. Beeley’s Gallivantin’, which came out in a self-financed edition of 200 in 1971, and its follow-up Passing Dream, cut as Will Beeley for the Malaco label in ‘79. The first is full-bodied solo folk, the second a serving of uncut country verve, and the reemergence of both comes attached with the good news of new Beeley material to be issued by Tompkins Square in 2018. Sage advice is to get hip to the guy’s stuff right now; Gallivantin’ and Passing Dream are available on vinyl June 30.

Historically, it’s been far more common for talent to be underappreciated or outright ignored than to be met with the deserved level of success. Gallivantin’ is the prime example of this circumstance; it’s a private press, but it’s not loner, outsider, or offbeat in any way. In fact, opening with a sharp cover of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and closing with an astute ten-minute merger of two songs by Buffy Sainte-Marie, “Little Wheel Spin and Spin/Co’dine,” the disc has a very strong connection to the folky spirit of the time.

Tackling Bob was, if not a prerequisite, then extremely common during the era, but it’s Beeley’s take on Sainte-Marie that really drives home Gallivantin’ as an in-tune byproduct of the folk scene. Most importantly, the high quality of his interpretations extends to the record’s eight originals, which unwind without a letdown; “Gallivanter” and “Summer Colored Skin” are loaded with imagery without going overboard, and “Walk” offers a blend of Leonard Cohen and the Greenwich Village that’s the highpoint of the first side. It’s followed by the scaled-back relationship ditty “And then I’ll Be Gone.”

Concision is another constant element, as seven songs, none breaking the three-minute mark, comprise side one. The brevity only serves to reinforce the album’s function as a demo of sorts for bigger labels; one listen to Gallivantin’ is all it takes to understand the interest of Elektra and Capitol, and it was through a promotion rep with A&M that Beeley hooked up with Malaco.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Neil Young will release his long out of print Decade anthology on June 23, on Reprise Records.

Originally released in 1977 on a triple vinyl set and compiled by Young, Tim Mulligan, and David Briggs, Decade has long been considered the definitive 35-song collection of material covering the years between 1966-1976—it features Neil Young solo and with Crazy Horse, Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, and the Stills-Young Band. Each of the tracks has been remastered with the original artwork and restored with inside photos by Joel Bernstein, Gary Burdan, Henry Diltz, and Tom Wilkes.

Recently, Decade was re-released to its original 3-LP vinyl configuration for Record Store Day 2017 in a limited pressing. It is now widely available once more on vinyl, as a two CD set, and digitally.

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“As ’80s babies we get our music mostly in CD form. Every now and then someone would dig out an over used cassette tape or the lucky few would even stroll confidently onto the school bus with a shiny new mini disc player. Up until the late ’90s, our only engagement with vinyl was to dig out one of our mum’s Gloria Estefan records as we would try to make ‘that scratchy sound’ that PaRapa the Rapa used to make on the Playstation. This was quickly stopped by our parents after a few broken needles.”

“In honesty, vinyl had always seemed archaic and cumbersome. Why lug a piano around when you can get a Casio from the local department store for £30? It was only when the digital age really dawned that I began to understand the real magic of holding a 120g piece of decorated plastic. By 2005, music was becoming so accessible that it was overbearing. It’s like sitting down at a restaurant and being presented with a menu that has 3,000 different dishes.

It was with this new-found feeling that I journeyed into the loft to dig out my parent’s old record collection and accompanying record player. I was greeted by the shiny leather trousers of Phil Lynott on the front of Thin Lizzy’s Live & Dangerous as well as a flamboyant Prince Rogers Nelson astride a mean looking motorbike on the cover of Purple Rain. Before I’d even heard a single note of sweet analogue sound, I got it. A 1970s teal Dansette Monarch later and I’m officially a convert.

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Excelling at protest material before honing an introspective approach that’s been naggingly underappreciated over the years, Phil Ochs stands as one of the essential folksingers of the 1960s. Live in Montreal, 10/22/1966 combines his pointed takedowns of authority and injustice with early solo readings of his less explicitly political songwriting, and the combination illuminates the artist’s range and commitment. The full show is spread across two compact discs, and is available now through RockBeat.

The mixing of music and politics has often inspired snorts of derision from those who feel that art should serve a loftier purpose than didacticism, sloganeering, persuasion, or protest. I’ll confess up front to having occasionally expressed this view, mostly when the music was unsubtle or sanctimonious, but the tenor of the times has surely adjusted my thoughts on the issue.

The putdowns of yours truly used to be targeted at scads of hardcore kids obsessing over Reagan or Bush père and/ or fils, or at rock stars preaching about injustice from the comfort of their gilded mansions, but indeed, current events have taken such a severe turn toward the shitty that I’m unreservedly pining for an onslaught of young upstarts chanting slogans of dissent as they call out the oppressors by name. Furthermore, any wealthy celebs who want to get in on the action, please step right up.

Of course, ranting to the converted regularly achieves little more than bucking up morale, while upper-class activism often breeds alienation and the codification of opposing viewpoints. Listening to Live in Montreal, 10/22/1966, it occurs to me that I’m really hoping for a musician (or a few) who can cut through the ugliness to call out the bullshit with clarity and beauty.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Music From The Motion Picture Baby Driver, the 30-song soundtrack for Edgar Wright’s heavily anticipated, music-laden film Baby Driver, is available now via Award winning producer and recording artist Danger Mouse’s 30th Century Records and Columbia Records. Featuring gems from almost every musical genre and spanning across multiple decades, the soundtrack can be purchased both physically as a two LP and two CD set, as well as digitally across all retailers.

Written and directed by Edgar Wright, Baby Driver tells the story of Baby, a talented, young getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who relies on the beat of his personal soundtrack to be the best in the game. When he meets the girl of his dreams (Lily James), Baby sees a chance to ditch his criminal life and make a clean getaway. But after being coerced into working for a crime boss (Kevin Spacey), he must face the music when a doomed heist threatens his life, love and freedom.

Danger Mouse premiered the music video for “Chase Me,” his new original song featuring Run The Jewels and Big Boi, created specifically for Baby Driver. Baby Driver opens nationwide in theatres on June 28, 2017.

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The Soft Boys are one of those bands that failed commercially for lack of a straight-talking high school guidance counselor. Because a straight-talking high school guidance counselor could have sat Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberly Rew down and said, “Look boys, your desire to make psychedelic rock is laudable. But it’s 1976, everybody’s wearing safety pins through their noses and screaming about anarchy, and to be perfectly blunt lads your desire to make a go of it as acid rockers makes about as much sense as pursuing careers as lamplighters. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I have an employer here who is looking for a dependable rat catcher.”

Alas, they had no one, which is why their magnum opus, 1980’s Underwater Moonlight, sold approximately 18 copies. The Soft Boys were at the right place but at the wrong time, and as the Velvet Underground will gladly inform you, timing is everything. Underwater Moonlight has gone on to become a neo-psychedelic masterpiece, but it hit the record stores well before everybody and his sister hopped aboard the paisley bandwagon just in time to enthrall a listening public looking for something completely different from post-punk. And by that time the Soft Boys were no more—the whimsical and eccentric Hitchcock having gone on to form Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, and Rew the commercially successful Katrina and the Waves.

The Soft Boys’ influences aren’t too hard to discern—The Beatles, The Byrds, Syd Barrett, and when it comes to sheer lyrical absurdity, the Bonzo Dog Band. But they are far more than the sum of these influences. Opening track “I Wanna Destroy You” is punk in attitude—less 1967 than 1976—but has a power pop heart, and is the catchiest anthem this side of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” And “Old Pervert,” which features some truly wonderful drum pummel, lots of fractured guitar, and some insane laughter, is nobody’s idea of a flower power Day-Glo acid rocker. The guitars are just too mean, and the lyrics are a million miles away from the Summer of Love. “I’m an old pervert and I hang around under the bridge/I won’t do you no harm I just wanna show what’s in my fridge,” sings a lecherous Hitchcock, before adding, “They said that I’m weird and disinfectant is all that I drink/Ah, but cleanliness of the soul is more important, don’t you think?”

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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.

Kazyak – When I Lived in Carolina
Dot Dash – Summer Light
Screamfeeder – All Over It Again
Dog Island – El Dorado
Moonbeams No Mas – We Waited Five Years
THE STICKS – Come Back
Cotton Mather – The Cotton Mather Pledge
Beta Days – Settled for Gold
Office Culture – Favor
Kevin Courtois – Needed You

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Howie Payne – The Brightest Star

Broken Circles – Triathalon – U
Brudini – The Nightcrawler
Little Reader – Disappearing One
The Radio Dept. – Swedish Guns
Jupiter Deluxe Tube – Home
Big Fresh – Paralyzed (feat. Robert Schneider)
Gold Casio – Socialites And Singer Types
The Arcturians – Storm
Floco Torres – You!
Jahn Rome – Burn (Prod. Kojo a.)