Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Robbie Grey on his 69th birthday. —Ed.

When people think about Modern English, the band that was formed in Colchester in the early eighties, it’s invariably their 1982 hit “I Melt With You” that comes to mind. It was dreamy, irresistible, and impossible to avoid. But before “I Melt With You,” to wit, on their 1981 debut LP Mesh & Lace, Modern English showed a far more raw and dissonant face to the world. Mesh & Lace made no comparisons with Duran Duran because it was an uncompromising slice of droning noise, bordering at times on chaos, and had far more in common with Joy Division and PiL than, say, Simple Minds.

Not everybody liked it, that’s for sure. Yo La Tengo’s Ira Robbins, writing for Trouser Press, sneered at Mesh & Lace, calling it “a load of monotonous droning and shouting by a precious art band oppressively weighed down by its self-conscious 4AD pretensions.” Precious they may have been, and droning to boot, but Mesh & Lace is anything but monotonous. Rather, it’s an adventurous foray into the heart of darkness by a band that would soon enough undergo a sea change that led to the synthpop of “I Melt With You.”

I’d have never known had it not been for a review comparing noise vandals Clockcleaner to Modern English. This struck me as akin to comparing GG Allin to the Partridge Family, because, like most sentient humans, I knew nothing more about Modern English than “I Melt With You.” “Balderdash!” I cried. But I’ll be damned if Mesh & Lace wasn’t one fearless foray into the precincts of noise for noise’s sake. Manic drumming, long drones, chanted lyrics—these guys took Joy Division one step further by sacrificing their melodies to the exigencies of total desperation. Mesh & Lace doesn’t sound like affectation to me; it sounds like a fatal bludgeoning by Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer.

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The fix is in. How else to explain how the Rolling Stones’ overly long new album with the hilariously hideous cover–to say nothing of sad cliches of sad cliches of better Mick and Keith songs from decades gone by—has been receiving laudatory review after laudatory review? Payola? If so, where’s my bulging envelope of filthy lucre?

Look, we all owe the Rolling Stones an enormous debt of gratitude for years of meritorious service. But how many years are we talking about exactly? When was the last time a new Rolling Stones album actually mattered? The late Seventies? We’re closing in on fifty years here. You could buy their last truly good LP on 8-track.

They’re down to three members—time waits for no one—but still they bang their drum across the rock world like an Energizer Bunny with a walker, catering to their aging contemporaries who keep hoping the Stones will deliver on some of their old black magic.

They’re also attracting the types of unimaginative people who only buy albums by bands they’ve heard of, and there’s barely a human on the planet who hasn’t heard of the Rolling Stones. And then there are those for whom the Rolling Stones still (inexplicably) carry the whiff of the bad boy about them.

2026’s Foreign Tongues is just the last in a long succession of Rolling Stones albums that bring to mind that Medical Alert Bracelets commercial where an old woman lying on the floor cries, “Help! I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!”

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Celebrating Blair Thornton on his 76th birthday. —Ed.

I always wanted to be a speed-eating, eighteen-wheeling, gearjamming truck-driving man. A long haul, chicken-lights-blazing, hammer-down cowboy with a fat load and nothing to lose on the look-see for plain wrappers, Tijuana taxis, local yokels, and everything in between. Alas, my vision’s on a par with that of Jose Feliciano, and I can’t see Jack Shit without a pair of corrective lenses approximately the thickness of that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Give me weed, whites, and wine, and show me a sign, and I will run over that sign, and flatten a couple of Volkswagens for good measure. I’m pretty much deaf to boot, which is why I make such an excellent music critic.

But hey, if you can’t be a real trucker, you can always listen to trucker music, and when it comes to trucker music, ain’t nobody on the road can beat Bachman Turner Overdrive. True, nobody took BTO seriously; I certainly didn’t take BTO seriously, and I actually liked ‘em. But the cold, hard fact is that their bland looks, complete lack of charisma, and zero hipness factor conspired against them, as did their weak good-to-bad song ratio. Over the course of a long and busy career, they were able to fill but a single-LP greatest hits, and just barely at that. Indeed, it’s hardly a credit to their post-1976 output that 1976’s Best of BTO (So Far) is a much stronger LP than 1986’s BTO’s Greatest.

A brief history: Randy Bachman was a member of Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Guess Who, left to form Brave Belt, and took on C.F. Fred Turner as a vocalist at the suggestion of fellow Canadian Neil Young. The big-voiced Turner led the struggling band in a harder-rocking direction, but they remained at a loss to secure a record label, being rejected 26 times. This was actually more times than girls rejected me who I asked to the senior prom.

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Celebrating Paul Cook on his 70th birthday. —Ed.

Well here it is–the first and best punk album ever vomited upon an unsuspecting public. And I don’t want to hear any naysaying or quibbling. With 1977’s Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten and Company fired a shot heard round the world, and the aftershocks of this LP will be felt as long as kids continue to form punk bands, which is forever.

Never Mind the Bollocks sounds every bit as snotty and uncompromising as the day it was released, but hindsight affords us the opportunity to look at where it fits into the history of rock ’n’ roll. The first thing I would note is how much it has in common with smart English hard rock. Given a large quantity of speed and set loose in the studio, Mott the Hoople might have sounded like this. Which brings us to another point. Like Mott’s Ian Hunter, Johnny Rotten is one smart bloke. He may not have attended Oxford, but our lad Johnny had a knack for saying what was on his mind. And he summed up what was on his mind when he said, “Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.”

The songs on Never Mind the Bollocks are slower than I remember, and their sound is fuller; they don’t have that razor-thin edge one associates with, say, the Ramones or the Clash. And they don’t have the pop overtones of those bands either. Listen to the Ramones now and they sound like a bubblegum band; the Sex Pistols don’t blow bubbles and their songs might as well be Brighton rock. The Sex Pistols roar thank to Steve Jones’ blunderbuss guitar, and Johnny Rotten is purest ferocity. The Sex Pistols produce a ferocious din, and I can’t think of a punk band that has ever come close to equaling them in sheer savagery.

I prefer the cartoon nihilism of the Sex Pistols to the pretend revolutionary tendencies of the Clash; if nothing else, cartoon nihilism is far funnier. By “cartoon nihilism” I mean to imply that the anarchy advocated by this band probably goes no further than ripping the occasional car radio antenna off. I do not mean to suggest Johnny Rotten’s disgust, hatred, and bile are not real. It only takes a few seconds of LP opener “Anarchy in the U.K.” to demonstrate the man isn’t just taking the piss.

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Sixties sacred cows Buffalo Springfield are a much-revered institution, much like Dinosaur Hall at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. And some people love dinosaurs, so I’ll have to tread carefully in this review, like a soldier making his nerve-wracking way across an IED-strewn mountain pass.

Buffalo Springfield fans are a surly and fanatical lot. You write about the band at your own risk. To pan them is to risk being impaled by a pitchfork. So politeness is called for. A delicate touch. Diplomacy. The de-escalation skills of a police negotiator.

So here it is, my measured and diplomatic opinion: Buffalo Springfield suck. They were folk-rock bores, and perhaps the most overrated band of the pre-Woodstock era. They left us a small handful of memorable songs, the most popular one being the dated “For What It’s Worth.” There are oldies, and then there are geriatrics. “For What It’s Worth” has one of those electric chair lifts to get it up and down the stairs.

Looking back at what I just wrote, I suppose I’m not very good at diplomacy. This could explain why I never achieved my lifelong dream of becoming Ambassador to Liechtenstein. And I think I’m in trouble. News spreads fast in the Buffalo Springfield fraternity, and fans are already up in arms, ululating as they stream out of every city, town, and country ending in “stan.” And word has it they’re letting their collective Freak Flag fly as they head in my direction, looking to give me a thorough peace and love mauling.

But please allow me, in the time I have left, to explain why I find Buffalo Springfield as appealing as a night of sexual congress with England Dan & John Ford Coley.

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The Band’s final concert, The Last Waltz, which was held on Thanksgiving, 1976, featured The Band, an assortment of celebrity guests, a brief reading from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a horn section, an estimated 8,000 pounds of cocaine, and exactly 90 gallons of gravy.

It’s odd how few people talk about the 90 gallons of gravy. They’re truly the unheralded stars of The Last Waltz, which was held in Winterland, Bill Graham’s legendary concert hall in San Francisco, and filmed by Martin Scorsese.

Ted Nugent was the headliner the following night. I think the Motor City Madman would have brought The Last Waltz to the next level. Truly, the only thing missing at The Last Waltz was a guy in a loincloth playing “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”

Instead of Nugent, we get Neil Diamond, who came on looking like the doppelganger of Jim Jones and sang the forgettable “Dry Your Eyes.” How did he end up at The Last Waltz? That’s what an apoplectic Levon Helm wanted to know. He said to a cowed studio manager, “Go to Robertson to tell Neil Diamond we don’t even know who the fuck he even is!”

The answer was simple. Robertson had recently produced Diamond’s LP Beautiful Noise and wanted to give the album some free publicity. And the song Diamond performed, “Dry Your Eyes,” was co-written by Robertson. It’s a lousy song, but I suspect it gave Robertson’s ego a stroke.

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Remembering Betty Davis, born on this date in 1944. —Ed.

Funk pioneer Betty Davis once summed up her music with one word—raw. That was a mild word for what she was doing. Friends of the sophisticated fashion model—who’d walked away from the glamour biz because she thought it required zero brains—were aghast at her on-stage persona; she was lewd and crude in her silver hot pants, leaning backwards, stance wide, cupping her hands around her crotch. Such outrageous behavior left the people who knew her wondering if the woman strutting her stuff on stage could possibly be their Betty Davis.

Davis was a symbol of Black Power and female empowerment—women weren’t supposed to behave the way she did on stage, or release nasty albums like her masterpiece, 1974’s They Say I’m Different. And she wasn’t playing the subservient woman; on “He Was a Big Freak” she’s the one wielding the turquoise whip.

On the cover of They Say I’m Different, Miles Davis’ second wife—who is credited with changing the course of his career by introducing him to the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone—is all legs topped by a spectacular Afro, and in her futuristic glam attire, different she definitely was. But it’s the music that matters, and the LP’s eight funk jams showcase Davis’ vocals, which range from the sultry to the flat-out salacious. The LP isn’t just a turn-on; it generates enough erotic wattage to light up Harlem.

She’s Black and proud of her roots; on the title track she sings “My Great Grandma didn’t like the foxtrot/Now instead she spitted snuff and boogied to Elmore James,” and he’s just one of her forebears she name checks on the track–she also gives shout outs to just about every blues legend from Big Mama Thornton to Bessie Smith. And when she announces she eats chitlins, it comes off as a dare—that’s her heritage, see, and fuck you if you think it makes her an unsophisticated lady.

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Remembering Roky Erickson, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

The late, great Roky Erickson saw dead people. He also saw zombies, vampires, demons, Lucifer, two-headed dogs, a creature with an atomic brain, alligators, and Sputnik. For all I know he saw unicorns too, but if so he didn’t tell anybody.

The former 13th Floor Elevators frontman was both a survivor and a hero; he struggled with mental illness for over 50 years, but never let it defeat him. He was forced to undergo electro-convulsive therapy, had thorazine shoved down his throat, and lived to tell the tale. Anybody who suffers from mental illness or knows someone who does understands just what a hard road he traveled. The man had spirit.

Given this back story, it can be difficult to distinguish Roky’s mental illness from his love of Grade B horror and science fiction movies, especially on 1981’s The Evil One, a veritable parade of all of the beasties, ghastlies, and ghoulies enumerated above. Produced by Creedence Clearwater Revival bassist Stu Cook (who played on two cuts), The Evil One’s songs are surprisingly catchy, mainstream even–take away the Halloween themes and dress ‘em up a little, and many of these songs would have sounded right at home on FM radio.

The songs on The Evil One stick with you–listen to the LP a couple of times and you’ll be able to hum along to most of ‘em. You may know all of the lyrics too. Erickson had a lot in common with Blue Öyster Cult, who also mated surprisingly melodic rock ’n’ roll with outré subject matter: Godzilla, extraterrestrials, Nazi fighter jets, flaming telepaths, and I think you get the idea.

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Celebrating Roger McGuinn on his 84th birthday. —Ed.

So I died and went to Heaven (naturally), and who should I see as I step off that divine airline but The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, which took me back a bit, as McGuinn is still very much alive. So I said, “Roger, sir, what are you doing here?” and he replied, “God likes my music so much he’s given me a hall pass to come and go as I please.”

So I asked him what the Lord’s favorite Byrds songs are, and he said, “Well, you’d think it would be ‘The Christian Life,’ but he actually doesn’t like that one very much. Says it’s a straightedge bummer. No, the song that always gets him is ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow’ or, if he’s been partaking of the magic mushrooms that are everywhere up here, ‘Eight Miles High.’ Says it can turn the most twisted trip into a Holiday Inn of the Mind.”

So here I am, typing this in between playing chess with Sam Cooke and drinking brandy with Richard Manuel, and basically all I want to say is that The Byrds were a great band, a very great band. Stylistically, they traveled a weird but not unique road from their early days as the Jet Set, from folk rock to psychedelia to pure country to a combination of all of the above, while establishing themselves as the world’s best Dylan interpreters—so that with every new album, you didn’t know what you were going to get, but you knew it would be interesting.

Between the band’s extraordinary harmonies and McGuinn’s guitar tuned to the key of LSD, it was hard to go wrong. And the talent! Between McGuinn (who was calling himself Jim then) and David Crosby and Gram Parsons and Gene Clark and Chris Hillman and Clarence White—all of whom passed through The Byrds at one point or another—they had enough great musicians to fill a whole wall in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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Celebrating Dave Smalley, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

When it comes to Seventies power pop, you tend to be either a Raspberries person or a Big Star person. Me, I’ve always been a Raspberries guy, if only because they were about as subtle as a brick. Now, Big Star had subtlety and class, but then again, they were so subtle and classy that hardly anybody heard of ‘em until they were long gone. Say what you will about the Raspberries–you could hear their songs on your car radio.

And as a male adolescent of the time, I could actually relate to the Raspberries in a way that I probably wouldn’t have related to the heartbreaking nostalgia of “September Gurls” or “Thirteen” because I was too young to be nostalgic, and all I wanted to do was go all the way, which was just about the only thing Eric Carmen sang about. He was the Dante Alighieri of Teenage Lust and as such gave voice to every shrieking hormone in my adolescent zit suit.

Musically, the Raspberries succeeded on a hybrid sound that was equal parts The Beatles, The Who, and The Beach Boys, with a wee pinch of The Faces thrown in for flavoring. Eric Carmen was a clever synthesist and even better thief with grand ambitions, and the epic sweep of his songs is a million miles away from the more nuanced power pop of Alex Chilton and Company. The Raspberries may have been from Cleveland, but they were a peek into a rock future that the overblown sonic likes of Boston would dominate, and I’m talking about the band, not the town.

Eric, who suffered from delusions of grandeur for sure, aimed for the fences every time out, and he struck out a lot. But when he connected, the result was power pop greatness, and his biggest homers can be found on Raspberries’ Best Featuring Eric Carmen (his hubris is right there in the LP’s title). He didn’t hit that many home runs, it’s true, but that’s one of the best things about this particular album. Some best-of compilations hit the skids cuz the people who put ‘em out pad ‘em with too much weak material, but that isn’t the case with this bare bones, 10-song 1976 best-of from a great band that was so much dust in the wind by the time it came out.

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Remembering Ronnie James Dio, born on this day in 1942. —Ed.

There are 666 things you need to know about Ronnie James Dio.

1. Ronnie is widely credited as having invented the “Sign of the Horns.” Under patent law, you are legally obliged to pay Ronnie 15 cents every time you use it. Per hand.

2. Fact: In 2003, Dio lost part of his thumb to what he called a “killer garden gnome.” Afterward, Ronnie tossed the gnome in the trash, but it kept coming back. “It’s out there,” he would tell friends, peeking out the window. “Waiting. Just waiting.”

3. Ronnie was a big medieval music fan and used to get together with former Rainbow bandmate and fellow medievalist Ritchie Blackmore to play flute, sing madrigals, and contract the Black Plague.

4. In a 1991 poll, kindergartners were asked what historical personage they would least want to see added to the cast of Sesame Street. Ronnie James Dio came in next-to-last, just before Adolf Hitler.

5. Ronnie, who was 5′ 4″, was once quoted as saying, “I always wanted to be a basketball player.” He then added, “Preferably with the Delaware Dwarves.”

6. Dio’s first band was called Elf. The name led to a revolt in the Elven community. Haldir, Elf of Lothlórien, told his troops, “We must crush the man on the Misty Mountain before he joins Black Sabbath and lays waste to the band that bequeathed us “Fairies Wear Boots.”

7. The biggest difference between Dio and his predecessor in Black Sabbath was that Dio didn’t have a serious ant addiction.

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Remembering Bon Scott, born on this date in 1946. —Ed.

Rock ‘n’ roll primitivists in thrall to electricity and American thighs, these salivating koala shaggers from Oz were the dingoes who REALLY got Meryl Streep’s baby, and maybe your baby (or your mom!) too. Just about everybody I know hates ‘em, thinks they’re dumb, but I’m a big fan of AC/DC’s brand of Down Under thunder—it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to being struck by lightning.

Released the year punk exploded, High Voltage (the band’s first international release) may as well have been a punk record; the snot quotient’s high enough. But the Aussie lager louts in AC/DC weren’t play-acting nihilists–all they wanted to do was get rich and get laid while sticking their tongues out (just like Angus on the album cover!) at everything (school, parents, jobs, the Twelve Commandments) that stood in their way.

Accidental electrocution risks like “Live Wire” and “High Voltage” let you know AC/DC has electricity on the brain, but that’s just cuz it takes a whole lotta juice to produce their bare-bones brand of arena-shaking amplification. Nobody’s ever accused AC/DC of subtlety, and that’s one of the things I love most about ‘em. They’re the rock’n’roll equivalent of Mike Tyson, dispensing with all that Muhammad Ali “float like a butterfly” bullshit shit in favor of big one-punch T.K.O.s.

And then there’s Bon Scott, whose premature death (gargling vomit really can be a health hazard) was a bona fide rock tragedy. High Voltage is hardly the best AC/DC LP in terms of songs (with a few exceptions they would go on to write better), or even sonic sturm und drang, but Scott–whose voice is all sandpaper and razor blades–never sounded better.

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Celebrating Courtney Love on her 62nd birthday. —Ed.

Lots of people despised Courtney Love back in the day. They viewed her as the talentless and vulgar villain in the lurid, drugged-out soap opera that was her marriage with Kurt Cobain, and if you listened to some of them, she was actually responsible for murdering the poor guy. Bullshit. To all of it. And to prove them all wrong, Love’s band Hole produced one of the very best albums of 1998, Celebrity Skin.

Celebrity Skin was Hole’s third LP, and some prefer its predecessors (1991’s Pretty on the Inside and 1994’s Live Through This) because Celebrity Skin constituted a turn away from post-grunge punk towards a more pop sound. In addition, unlike most of the songs on Hole’s previous efforts, the bulk of the songs on Celebrity Skin were team efforts, with another two being written by guitarist/collaborator Eric Erlandson without Love’s assistance. Finally, Love saw fit to enlist the help of Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy “Ol’ Cueball” Corgan, who gets partial songwriting credits on five of the LP’s twelve tracks.

The songs on Celebrity Skin aren’t merely pretty on the inside; they’re pretty on the outside as well. The LP’s title is its theme—Love abandons overcast Seattle for sunny California, and the LP’s pop leanings reflect that fact. Which isn’t to say its themes are sunny as well—far from it. It’s the contrast between sun-drenched melody and dark message that makes Celebrity Skin so potent a work.

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Remembering Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

For the past week or so, I’ve been walking around singing “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” in a resonant voice, pretty much nonstop. I don’t sing all 19 minutes of it, mind you. You can’t sing a drum solo. Still, my significant other is threatening divorce, and we’re not even married.

A monolithic monument of molten metal sung by a guy with enunciation problems, Iron Butterfly’s 1968 “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (on the LP of the same title) hit the charts at the dawning of the progressive rock era, when 19-minute song cycles with titles like “Crystals Medusa” or “King Arthur’s Gelatinous Sceptre” were beginning to blight the musical landscape. There is nothing “progressive” about the 19 minutes of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”–the song’s a regressive return to the primitive simplicity of “Louie Louie” and anybody–even me–could play it, for hours if the mood struck.

“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is all primal force, an implacable juggernaut that grinds exceedingly fine–you don’t listen to it as much as get out of its way. Forget the Age of Aquarius–to quote Blue Öyster Cult, “This ain’t the garden of Eden… and this ain’t the summer of love.”

No, it’s the most ominous song about Adam and Eve’s playground ever–guitarist Erik Braun’s repeated fuzz-guitar riff, keyboard player/vocalist Doug Ingle’s ominous church organ, and Lee Dorman’s speaker-shuddering bass are all menace, and the only problem I have with the song–and it’s a serious one–is the way its forward motion is interrupted by a couple of lengthy solos–the first (unconscionably) by Ron Bushy on drums and the second by Ingle on organ. I’d have preferred an impregnable wall of heavy metal noise with no exits, no interruptions, no let up—the West Coast’s retort to the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray.”

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Celebrating Ringo Starr in advance of his 86th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

News flash! Critic declares Ringo Starr greatest ex-Beatle! Rioting breaks out in hipster enclaves! Brooklyn in flames! Incensed Lennonites carry signs: “Michael Little = Dingbat!” Hairy Harrisonoids counsel karmic calm: “This too shall pass!” McCartney maniacs attempt to sooth selves with “Silly Love Songs”! NME headline reads: “Panned on the run!”

In my dreams. But it’s what I really believe. I really believe that Ringo Starr, who never got no respect and was the comic foil and clown of the legendary Fab Four has—over the almost four-and-a-half decades since the Beatles went the way of the Ono, er make that Dodo—produced far more genuinely likeable pop songs than any of his “genius” fellow Mop Toppers.

But first, a sordid confession. I’ve never cared much for Ringo’s old band. I can count on one hand the number of Beatles songs I really love (“Helter Skelter,” “She Said She Said,” “Hey Jude,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and “Let It Be”). As for most of the rest of their oeuvre, it could vanish into the void and I would never miss it.

And there are plenty of songs (the dreadful “Long and Winding Road,” the hideous “Something,” and the unpalatable “Got to Get You Into My Life”) whose disappearance would make me very happy. As for the post-Beatles work of John, Paul, and George, I can think of maybe one or two (at most) songs I love by each of them. Shit, Ringo matched them with ONE single, 1971’s “It Don’t Come Easy” backed by “Early 1970,” a very funny series of good-natured jibes about his former band mates.

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