Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Martin Chambers on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

A couple of days ago, I found myself doing something I haven’t done (no exaggeration) in years: dancing. I dervished about the apartment all by myself, like a lunatic, with the cat looking on from the safety of the bed, wide-eyed with imminent peril. I could tell the poor puss was thinking, “What the devil is he doing?” So I cried, “Listening to The Pretenders, you hairy little fool! And dancing!”

I would not call The Pretenders a great band, per se. A very, very good band, sure. Chrissie Hynde is an excellent songwriter and has one of the most distinctive voices in rock. Unfortunately, like Badfinger, The Pretenders are just as famous for their tragically high mortality rate as they are for their music.

During the 2-year hiatus between 1981’s Pretenders II and 1983’s Learning to Crawl, Hynde saw two bandmates, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon, die in drug-related deaths. Technically, Farndon was no longer a Pretender—Hynde fired him shortly before he died—but still. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the subject of orphans, to lose one band member is bad luck—to lose two, sheer carelessness.

Hynde, an Akron, Ohio native, formed The Pretenders in 1978 in London, England, where she was working as a journo for NME and at SEX, the legendary fashion boutique of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. She received a record contract on the strength of a demo recorded with a three-piece band that included Phil Taylor of Motörhead, then hired a permanent group that included Honeyman-Scott, Farndon, and drummer Martin Chambers.

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On their landmark 2006 LP Pink, Japan’s Boris are all over the place, delving into more metal genres than you can count and topping them off with a pair of ambient tracks. It would be downright disorienting if their fallback song strategy weren’t breakneck fast and furious. And noisy. Pink has been praised for being more melodic than Boris’ previous work. Melodic, I don’t hear.

How all over the place is Boris? The genres mentioned in association with Pink include doom metal, sludge metal, stoner rock, thrash, ambient, hardcore, garage punk, garage rock, noise prog, dream pop, post-metal, and post-rock. That’s a formidable laundry list, and I don’t hear all of them. In fact, I don’t hear most of them. What I hear is a metal band with a love for thrash who like to throw mucho dissonant freak guitar into the mix.

What I also hear is an album that metal fans, especially those who love frenetic guitars, jet engine noise, and hypersonic tempos, should love. And I was pleased to discover they even have a song that reminds me of Minneapolis’s psycho noise rock band Cows.

Genres I don’t hear: Norwegian death disco, thrash folk ambient, Serbo-Canadian techno-polka, and I could go on. I also searched in vain for Donnie Osmond screamo or a speed freak post-rock cover of Pentangle’s “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.” Boy, does lead singer Jacqui McShee have hypnotic bug eyes!

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Celebrating Don Brewer on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

A half century and change down the line, it boggles the imagination to think that Flint, Michigan’s Grand Funk (with or without that “Railroad”) were one of the biggest touring acts of the early Seventies. The proof lies in this shocking factoid—in 1971 (the Chinese “Year of the Funk”), the trio of Mark, Don, and Mel sold out Shea Stadium in 72 hours. It took The Beatles (The Beatles!) several weeks to do the same.

Manager Terry Knight was a key driver of the band’s success, and his messianic belief in their world importance took a hilarious turn in his liner notes (written on parchment scroll!) to the 1972 compilation Mark, Don & Mel. Wherein he compares “the Funk” to Moses, Cleopatra, and Napoleon and writes, “From the dawn of recorded history, stemming through the lifetimes of every man, woman, and child who ever walked upon the earth, there have been but a handful whose fate it was to become known as Phenomenon.” It was quite a tribute to a band whose output included songs like “High Falootin’ Woman,” but you have to admire his grandiosity.

Knight’s hype, a manic album release schedule, and over-the-top promotion (a huge billboard in NYC’s Times Square) helped fuel the fire, but Grand Funk did it mostly on their own, with nonstop touring and a high-energy, “obnoxiously loud” live show that emphasized shirtless torsos over finesse, subtlety, and great songs. Guitarist Mark Farner, drummer Don Brewer, and bassist Mel Schacher were three groovy dudes fashioning clunky, workmanlike grooves that not only achieved highly amplified mediocrity but came to personify it.

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Celebrating Barry Gibb on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most twee of them all? Belle and Sebastian? The Shop Assistants? The Pastels? Well, sure, if you adhere to a literalist definition of twee as a post-indie phenomenon. But I take the sniper’s long-range view of music history, and like to think there’s nothing new—including twee—under the sun. For these reasons, I would argue that the sixties’ Bee Gees—those pre-Three Disco Kings with their chipmunk voices, vice-grip-tight three-part harmonies, and whimsical takes on Summer of Love psychedelia, baroque pop, and blue-eyed soul—were the tweest bunch to ever tiptoe through the pop tulips.

I was too young for the late-sixties iteration of the Bee Gees; the first I heard of The Bros. Gibb were their mid- to late-seventies megahits as Overlords of the Hustle and the Electric Slide. I didn’t much care for the Disco Bee Gees—although I’ve warmed to them since—and hence had no desire to check out the music they made before becoming the Typhoid Marys of Saturday Night Fever. Then I heard Alice Donut’s transcendent cover of “Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You,” and I was enthralled. This was one of the gr-gr-grooviest slices of psychedelia I’d ever heard, and it was by… the Bee Gees? I ran, didn’t walk, to Spotify. I had to skip the light fandango with the Brothers Gibb—and post haste!

Now what I’m about to say will shock you—perhaps even see me drummed in disgrace out of the critical corps, my quill snapped over the knee of TVD’s own General Patton, Jon Meyers. But I’ll say it anyway: having listened to it some 300 times, I can honestly say I enjoy Bee Gees 1st more than any Beatles album except that white one of theirs. And I exclude that one solely for sentimental reasons related to its inspirational effect on the Manson Family.

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Celebrating Van Morrison on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

Four years before Ronnie Van Zant uttered the immortal words “Turn it up” to open “Sweet Home Alabama,” Van Morrison was uttering the same injunction—but in his case, he was talking about your radio, not the world’s greatest Southern Rock band. The Gaelic soul singer with the mystical streak turned the phrase into a mantra on “Caravan” from the 1970s Moondance, and by so doing, transformed your cheap hand-held FM transistor radio into a means of tuning into the cosmos. That little radio is, quite literally, our ticket to Heaven.

From “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night” with his days with Belfast, Ireland’s Them to the brilliant string of solo efforts that extended from 1968’s Astral Weeks, 1970’s Moondance and that same year’s His Band and the Street Choir, 1971’s Tupelo Honey to 1972’s St. Dominic’s Preview, Morrison veered from the simple romantic lyricism of songs like “Tupelo Honey” and “Moondance” to deeply spiritual and more ambitious songs like “Listen to the Lion,” “Cypress Avenue,” and “Madame George.” Call them his Songs of Innocence and Experience.

On 1970’s Moondance—which is horn-heavy and replete with female backing vocalists—Morrison works the innocence vein, while imbuing many of its songs with a deep strain of Irish mysticism that charges even the simplest of subjects with a sense of awe. On “And It Stoned Me,” he gets drunk on a jar of water from a mountain stream. On “Into the Mystic,” he takes us spiritually seaward—just as he does on “Tupelo Honey” and “Listen to the Lion.” He implores us to let our spirits fly; tells us he wants to rock our gypsy souls, and lets us know “it’s too late to stop now.”

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Song inspired by Irwin “Master of Disaster” Allen, performed by early disco heroes The Trammps backed up by the fellow Philadelphians in MFSB–how can you go wrong?

Clocking in at almost eleven minutes, 1976’s “Disco Inferno”—which wouldn’t become a Disco Mountain-sized hit until it was included on the soundtrack of the following year’s Saturday Night Fever—proved that longer could be better.

Covered by the likes of Tina Turner (soul-scream great), Cyndi Lauper (pure technosuck), and the mighty Killdozer (brain-battering brilliant), but not by 50 Cent, whose song of the same name is NOT a remake—“Disco Inferno” has firmly established itself as part of the entire world’s musico-cultural landscape.

Proof lies in the fact that there have been more dance remixes of the song than you can count on your three hands!

Inspired by Allen’s 1974 film The Towering Inferno, Killdozer has recorded the only other tribute to the film in the hilarious “Man vs. Nature”—“Disco Inferno” more than makes up for its lack of funny with a towering sound that has transformed many a checkered disco floor into a dance conflagration capable of setting fire to the disco ball on the ceiling.

The Trammps—who got their name from Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 silent film The Little Tramp, then added the extra “M” to indicate they were “superior tramps”—were largely a vocal group. I’m talking about five, count ‘em five vocalists, only two of whom played instruments (they would be bass vocalist Earl Young on drums and non-singer Ronald Baker on bass).

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Celebrating Martin Lamble, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

I know what you’re thinking—If you’re going to write about Fairport Convention, why not choose Liege and Lief, their undisputed masterpiece and the album that practically kick-started the English folk rock movement? Because I’d like to kick the English folk rock movement, that’s why. It’s what I call, unaffectionately, Renaissance Faire Musick.

And Liege and Lief exemplifies its most annoying hallmark, namely the tendency to recast Ye Olde English folk songs, complete with annoying verbal anachronisms, and add electric guitars. What you end up with is Sandy Denny singing in that ethereal voice of hers about kirtle greens (whatever they are) and dudes named Reynardine. Worst of all, she actually utters the word “maidenhead.” And unless used ironically (e.g., “Twas at a show by the Grateful Dead/That I lost my maidenhead/Beneath the bleachers/During ‘Tennessee Jed’”), I consider “maidenhead” (along with “merkin”) an automatic deal-breaker.

So while I like some of the songs on Liege and Lief—“Medley: The Lark in the Morning” hoedowns along like Roy Clark on Hee Haw—I ultimately opted to review Fairport Convention’s eponymous debut album instead. For one, the band recorded it before they got their folk freak on, and there isn’t a single song on it that goes, “So he’s gone ta fetch a claes prop/And he rammed it up the koondy.” (Rammed it up the koondy? His own koondy?? That sounds extremely painful.) Also—and this may be the real reason I picked it—Richard Thompson’s brilliant guitar playing is all over it.

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Is it possible that the greatest psychedelic noise rock group in the history of the world is an obscure Japanese band with a difficult name whose former members include a plane hijacker? And who couldn’t be bothered to release much of what they recorded? And whose singer/guitarist/resident genius, Takashi Mizutani, whose one-time association with members of Japan’s outlawed Red Army Faction led him to become a bona fide recluse out of fear he’d end up in prison?

It’s more than possible—it’s a fact. At their best, such as on the live recording YaneUra Sept. ’80—which wasn’t released until 2024, some five years or so after Mizutani’s death, the actual date of which is sketchy and didn’t become public knowledge until some two years after he passed away—delivered on some of the most ferocious guitar workouts ever to be committed to vinyl.

They weren’t exactly prolific songwriters—most of their many releases feature the same maybe dozen or so songs, which they would play completely differently on any given night. And the sound quality varies from recording to recording—one of the many advantages of the live YaneUra Sept. ’80 is that it sounds clear as a bell.

The band’s early sound from the late sixties to early seventies was truly chaotic, and so cranked-up in volume that someone said, “It was so loud, it hurt my skin.” They would cover songs like “Twist and Shout” (a must-hear) to “Tobacco Road” and played mostly at the destined-to-be-razed OZ club, hence the seminal OZ Tapes, which wasn’t released until 2022 by the frequent LRD chroniclers at the Temporal Drift label. There’s also OZ Days Live, a twofer released in 1973.

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Celebrating Elvis Costello on his 72nd birthday. —Ed.

The early Elvis Costello was the very personification of the angry young man. He may have looked like a twerp, but he had a chip on his shoulder the size of blues harmonica guy John Popper. He was perpetually peeved, was Costello, in the fashion of 1966 Bob Dylan, and like Dylan he could—and did—spew vitriol inspired enough to scald. Listening to his debut LP, 1977’s My Aim Is True, it’s as clear as day he’d just as soon see you paralyzed. So forget about the Buddy Holly glasses and the gap between his two front teeth and all the rest of it—musically, the man was a walking, talking third rail.

Costello (aka Declan Patrick MacManus) was born in 1954, just in time to ride the first waves of punk and new wave. He worked office jobs (they’ll always make you angry) while simultaneously looking for a record label. Stiff Records anted up, and Costello recorded My Aim Is True. Just how angry was he?

There was the iconic moment on Saturday Night Live when he stopped the band during a song opening to replace it with “Radio Radio”—an attack on the media that SNL executives had expressly forbidden him to play. This moment alone increased his snottiness factor, which sold him records, which may or may not have been calculated. He said later, in an imagined interview I had with him, “I was never really pissed. I wanted to be James Taylor. But there already was a James Taylor. You can’t have two James Taylors. The world would be destroyed by fire and rain.”

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Remembering Danny Joe Brown, born on this day in 1951. —Ed.

I consider myself a southern rock fan of sorts—Lynyrd Skynyrd is one of my favorite bands, and I still plan to get that tattoo of their plane going down, Ronnie Van Zant looking out a window and saying, “Turn it up!”—but I always drew the line at Molly Hatchet. I think it had to do with those fantasy covers—you know, the ones with steroidal Huns in Viking helmets like the sopranos in operas wear, wielding wicked-looking double axes. I’ve never liked fantasy art, or people who like fantasy art, and while I’m ashamed to admit I refused to listen to a band because of its album covers, it’s the god-honest truth.

Anyway, I finally took the plunge, and I was shocked—Molly Hatchet wasn’t half bad. A kind of poor man’s Lynyrd Skynyrd—both bands hailed from swampy Jacksonville, Florida—Molly Hatchet boasted a singer who sounded a lot like Ronnie Van Zant and three guitarists just like Skynyrd, which gave them the ability to “Free Bird” out to their heart’s content.

True, their songwriting skills were never up to Skynyrd standards—all meat and potatoes, only without the meat—but they were good enough, good enough. And when I call Molly Hatchet a poor man’s Lynyrd Skynyrd it’s not a total diss, because I still—having finally heard them—rate them above the Outlaws, the Charlie Daniels Band, .38 Special, The Marhall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, and all the rest of their Southern Rock brethren, with the exception of Black Oak Arkansas, because BOA is just so fucking weird.

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I was going to write about kittencore, which is a real sub-genre of screamo, the mere thought of which cracks me up, and then I was going to write about mallcore because it’s a real thing too and has to be the funniest sub-sub-sub-sub-genre (of screamo again) in the history of humankind. But in the end, I decided to write about The Clean, because they hail from New Zealand, where screaming is considered a breach of decorum.

Oh, and they’re a great band, nice Dunedin lads who’ve probably never screamed in their lives, and they have a melodic lo-fi thing going on with some guitar jingle-jangle and hints of a drone and occasional guitar workouts of the sort that let you know they’re familiar with a certain little-known group from far-from-Kiwiland New York City called the Velvet Underground. Why, Robert Christgau went so far as to call them “garage Velvets.”

But that’s extremely reductionist—they’re an eclectic’s dream and do all sorts of other things. Occasionally, they break out the Farfisa organ, and I even hear Joy Division in one of their songs. And they’re not scowling nihilists, as is evident from the lines from “Point That Thing Somewhere Else” that go, “Anything could happen, and it could be right now/And the choice is yours, so make it worthwhile.”

The Clean were formed in 1978 and are often credited with founding indie rock. I have no idea if this is true. It sounds like a gross simplification to me. But if so, I suspect they could be directly responsible for the Smashing Pumpkins. If I were certain about it, I’d dock them half a grade.

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In August 1966, Wilson Pickett released The Exciting Wilson Pickett. It did more than just live up to its title—it made him. His third LP included four crossover hits, including “Land of a Thousand Dances” and “In the Midnight Hour,” and firmly established him as one of the premier soul and R&B belters of the time.

Some four months or so later (on January 1, 1967, to be precise) Wilson released The Wicked Pickett, and it more than lived up to its name. Indeed, it may as well have been called The More Exciting Wilson Pickett, and this despite the fact that it spawned only two hits, one of them the iconic “Mustang Sally.”

Both LPs were recorded at FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where his co-musicians included members of that studio’s legendary house band, the Swampers. But whereas it took him almost a year to record The Exciting Mr. Pickett, he only spent two days recording The Wicked Pickett. Which may or may not have anything to do with the startling and rarely remarked upon distinction between the two albums.

On The Exciting Mr. Pickett, the singer sounds almost restrained (by Pickett’s live wire standards). On The Wicked Pickett, the “hard soul” titan’s vocals are positively galvanizing. He doesn’t just sing; he takes the words in his teeth and shakes them until they scream. Except Pickett is the one screaming. He screams a lot.

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Remembering Phil Lynott, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

You wanna hear a miracle? I lived for almost five-and-a-half decades without ever hearing Jailbreak, or any other Thin Lizzy album for that matter. Here, vocalist/bassist and chief songwriter Phil Lynott and his Irish compatriots put out a truly tremendous LP in America’s Bicentennial Year, not to mention a parcel of other great LPs, and what was I doing? Listening to Elton John, John Denver, England Dan, and John Ford Coley, any band basically with a guy named John in it. If Debbie Gibson’s middle name had been John, I would have listened to her, too.

I would love to be able to say I wasn’t into hard rock back then, but I owned albums by Bad Company, UFO (UFO? Me? Inexplicable!), Robin Trower, and Foghat, so that’s sheer bunk. But there’s no point in crying over guilty milk, and it’s never too late to make up for past mistakes, that is, unless you’re Lee Harvey Oswald or that chimpanzee (name: Travis) who ripped a woman’s face off in 2009, and I’m neither of those personages.

So here I am making up for atoning for my inexplicable oversight, and listening to Jailbreak, which mixes tremendous twin-guitar hard rockers with sweeter fare, all of which I love with the possible exception of “Cowboy Song”—in which Lynott, a black Irishman, plays rodeo cowpoke.

But I take that back. “Cowboy Song” may start slowly, but its guitar solos are tremendous, and Lynott’s vocals are impassioned (especially when he sings, “It’s okay amigo/Just let me go/Riding in the rodeo”), and the jam at the song’s end is a bono fido guitar marvel. Turns out I love the damn thing! Just as I love everything about the LP, except for its cover. Too sci-fi for my decidedly earthbound tastes.

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Remembering Carl Wayne, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.

This is what fans of The Move call a masterpiece? You might expect it to be, seeing as how it’s the product of the bizarre mind of professional eccentric Roy Wood, future co-founder of Electric Light Orchestra and founder of the glam rock band Wizzard. And that’s the major flaw of 1970’s Shazam–despite the presence of Wood, the album isn’t eccentric enough.

The Move takes a scattershot approach on Shazam, delving into art rock, classical rock, raga rock, and proto-metal, while also taking stabs at The Beatles and sixties folk rock. But their most important influence is the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and that’s where things fall apart. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band kept whimsical tongue firmly planted firmly in dada cheek, but on Shazam The Move want to have it both ways. They wander into Stanshall/Innes territory on a couple of cuts, but for the most part, they play it straight. Shazam is a case of a split personality, and it’s too late for it to seek therapy.

“Cherry Blossom Clinic” makes the comedy grade, what with its light-hearted treatment of “they’re coming to take me away ha ha” lunacy, but the song is ruined for me by the extended foray into the music of Bach and Paul Dukas. Sure, it’s all in fun, but I don’t enjoy being classically gassed–if I wanted to listen to the likes of Bach, I’d have to become a different person, because the person I am is bored stiff by the stuff.

Far less funny is the opening of the tender and very serious “Beautiful Daughter,” in which the band takes the same “talk to the man in the street” approach the Bonzo Dog Band employed in their masterpiece of absurdity, “Shirts.” Trouble is, with the exception of the old woman who responds to the question of whether she likes pop music by saying, “Well, it’s nice in its way, you know some of it, not uh, not when they go naked,” the Q and A just ain’t that funny. One laugh line doesn’t not a comedy classic make.

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Who the hell was Frank Wilson? And why should you care? The simple answer is that Wilson was a songwriter and producer who wrote or produced dozens of hits for Motown acts like the Four Tops, The Supremes (both before and after Diana Ross jumped ship), The Miracles, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, Brenda Holloway, and many more, including Stevie Wonder, Ike and Tina Turner, and Marvin Gaye.

Wilson also tested the waters as a recording act, recording a song in 1965 that never made it past the demo stage. He subsequently released three songs (two on Motown compilations between 1978 and 2012). All of them fared about as well as the Titanic. Wilson never made a dent in the charts. Amazingly enough, it was the 1965 song that was never released that accounts for Wilson’s small degree of fame. It makes for an interesting story.

Two hundred and fifty demo copies of “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” were pressed. But Motown head honcho Berry Gordy, who disliked the vocals and was dead set on preventing his producers from pursuing recording careers, asked Wilson to decide—he could pursue a career as a recording artist, but if he did, it was the end of his relationship with Motown. Basically, Gordy gave Wilson an ultimatum—destroy the demos or else.

Wilson prudently chose the latter, doing as Berry bid—he destroyed the two hundred and fifty demos. (It’s not known whether he set them on fire, tossed them in the Detroit River, or trampled them like grapes.) And that would have been that had several copies (two or five, depending on who you ask) not survived, perhaps by escaping the studio and joining the Witness Protection Program.

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