Author Archives: Michael H. Little

The hit you know, and for a reason (it’s vintage Lennon), the rest you probably don’t know, and for a reason (they vary from fair to middling to awful), and one thing is clear–1973’s Mind Games is the work of a John Lennon who’d lost his way and would never find it again, unless you count 1980’s Double Fantasy, which was tanking until he was assassinated outside the Dakota, at which point grieving critics and fans alike decided (because the story had to have some kind of redemptive ending) that it was a return to form.

Martyrdom (if that’s what you want to call it) is a sure-fire way of winning a Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year. I recommend it to every famous artist on his or her way down.

Recorded as his relationship with Yoko Ono was deteriorating (he’d soon begin his infamous LA “Lost Weekend” with May Pang and constant companion in drunken debauchery Harry Nilsson) and he was being hassled by the U.S. government, Mind Games is a mixture of the personal and the political, but overall the album is a throwaway-heavy muddle.

Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau called it Lennon’s “worst writing yet,” adding that that Lennon was “helplessly trying to impose his own gargantuan ego upon an audience … [that] is waiting hopefully for him to chart a new course.” Another wrote that it “consisted of so-so songs that hardly lodged in the memory.” The least commercially successful Beatle wasn’t moving forward, which is hardly surprising when one considers that he was in a muddle when he wrote its songs—or rather tossed them off in the course of a single week.

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Remembering Richard Manuel, born on this day in 1943. —Ed.

When I think of The Band, which just happens to be my favorite group in the whole wide world, it’s not “The Weight” that first comes to mind, or “This Wheel’s on Fire” or “Rockin’ Chair” or even the brilliant body of ramshackle demos they recorded with Bob Dylan in the basement of the rented house they dubbed Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York in 1967.

No, what I think about is the scene in 2003’s Festival Express—a documentary about the financially ill-fated but fun for all involved 1970 rock tour that crossed Canada by train—where Rick Danko leads a lounge car full of rock stars (including Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia) in a wonderfully wasted rendition of “Ain’t No More Cane (On the Brazos).” Danko is so gloriously fucked-up, and his crazed smile and arm-waving performance so full of joy, that it seems the embodiment of the spirit of The Band itself, whose ensemble playing brimmed over with high spirits, camaraderie, and the sheer joy of making music.

The Band—whose country and Motown-tinged roots rock and wonderful songs filled with colorful characters conjured up the topsy-turvy spirit of a mythical and long-lost America—released only one live album during its original incarnation, 1972’s double-live Rock of Ages. Recorded during a triumphant four-night stint at NYC’s Academy of Music as 1971 came to a close, Rock of Ages featured The Band supplemented by a five-piece horn section arranged by New Orleans’ Allen Toussaint, as well as a guest appearance by Bob Dylan. It remains one of rock’s greatest live albums, along with Bob Dylan at Budokan… er, make that Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert and Killdozer’s The Last Waltz, which is not to be confused with another album bearing the same name by a band I can’t think of at the moment.

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Remembering Ronnie Lane, born on this date in 1946. —Ed.

In 1972 French-Canadian actor Alexis Kanner approached Faces’ bassist and vocalist Ronnie Lane about composing the soundtrack for the film Mahoney’s Last Stand, which I’ve never seen but from what I’ve read about it sounds like a non-comedic Green Acres. Lane accepted and enlisted Faces guitarist Ron Wood to join the project, then recruited a lot of whizz-bang rock and roll talent as farm hands. The result is this 1972 LP, which oozes a rustic charm that more than makes up for its lack of lofty ambition. This is the sound of musicians hanging out and having fun, and producing some very likable off-the-cuff music while they’re at it.

Lane—who succumbed in 1997 to multiple sclerosis at the tragically young age of 51—was the heart (he had a huge one) and soul (he oozed the stuff) of the Faces. Rod Stewart got the attention—too much of it towards the end—but Ronnie embodied the band’s rambunctious approach to rock and roll and wrote (or co-wrote) some of the band’s most endearing and poignant songs, including “Ooh La La,” “Glad and Sorry,” and “Debris.”

And that doesn’t include the great songs he produced for the Small Faces and his wonderful 1977 collaboration with Pete Townshend, Rough Mix. As for Ron Wood, he exemplified the shambolic and always joyous spirit of the Faces as well, and I’ll argue to my dying day that he did (by far) his best work with them. He may be better remembered for his years with the Rolling Stones, but I would gladly trade it all for the jet engine guitar he plays on “Stay with Me” and his down-to-earth vocal turn on “Ooh La La.”

The motley crew who played on the sessions for the film score included the likes of Townshend, Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, R&R saxophone legend Bobby Keys, Blind Faith and Traffic bassist Ric Grech, Rolling Stones’ road manager and pianist Ian Stewart, Faces (and later Who) drummer Kenney Jones, trumpet player Jim Price, Grease Band/Fairport Convention drummer Bruce Rowland and various other odds and sods. Conspicuous by his absence was Rod Stewart—Lane was justifiably angry at the time with Stewart’s rapidly fading interest in the Faces due to his solo success, and he was particularly galled by the fact that the Faces were increasingly being looked upon as Stewart’s backing band.

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Celebrating Mick Ralphs on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

Mott the fookin’ ‘Oople—you gotta love ‘em. They were the first band I ever sang along with in front of the mirror, imaginary microphone in hand, checking out my rock star moves. The song was “All the Young Dudes,” of course, and the album bearing the same title belonged to my oldest brother, who was the closest thing my tiny hometown had to an actual glam rocker; he glammed up a couple of pairs of stacked-heel shoes with sky-blue paint and glitter, and actually walked around in them, which took balls in a place where shoes like that practically screamed fag and Grand Funk Railroad was considered avant-garde.

The Mott the Hoople story is legendary; they recorded four albums that didn’t do very well, mainly because they were a diffuse mix of sludgy hard rock, irksome folk, Ian Hunter’s Dylanesque musings, and covers of everyone from Little Richard to Melanie to yes, you heard me correctly, Sonny Bono. That said, LP number 3, 1971’s Brain Capers, was a real breakthrough, containing as it did such weird and wonderful numbers as “The Moon Upstairs,” “Death May Be Your Santa Claus,” and that bizarre little ditty “The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception,” not to mention a stunning cover of Dion DiMucci’s harrowing but ultimately redemptive heroin confessional, “Your Own Backyard.”

Still, the band had decided to call it quits following a disaster of a gig in an abandoned gas holder in Switzerland—you know you’re in trouble when you’re reduced to playing an abandoned gas holder anywhere–which Hunter recounts in detail in the excellent “Ballad of Mott the Hoople (26 March 1972)” off 1973’s Mott. When who should come knocking to beg them to reconsider but Ziggy Stardust himself, who as an incentive offered them first dibs on “Suffragette City,” which they turned down (!). So the Zigster sat down and wrote “All the Young Dudes” specifically for them. Said lead singer Ian Hunter, “I’d been waiting to hear something like that all my life.” The band regrouped, this time adorned in the outrageous trappings of glam.

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Celebrating John Evan, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

Despite their much-vaunted reputation for producing ambitious concept albums of enormous heft, Jethro Tull are bearable only as a singles band. Sure, Tull’s 1971 concept album Aqualung is a classic, but I’d sooner be hit with a brick than listen to the following year’s concept album Thick as a Brick, and the only passionate feelings I can summon up for 1973’s concept album A Passion Play (yes, they hit the trifecta!) can be summed up with the words “Turn it off.” But “Bungle in the Jungle” and “Living in the Past”? Count me in!

Ian Anderson has always been an entertaining and exasperating crank—stand him on one leg like a deranged flamingo and hand him a flute and he will tie your mind into sailors’ knots with his folk-rock swoops, loops, and other assorted paradiddle, that is when he isn’t spouting folksy wisdom and moralistic sermons of the sort you’d expect from the stewed Diogenes permanently welded to the end stool in your local pub.

I disagree with The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, who wrote of old flamingo leg “Ian Anderson is one of those people who attracts admirers by means of a principled arrogance that has no relation to his actual talents or accomplishments” for the simple reason that Anderson is talented—he has simply misused his talent for evil. Thick as a Brick is ample proof of this fact.

But it takes a real genius to fritter away all of one’s talent, and Anderson isn’t that sort of real genius. Seemingly despite himself he has produced songs that don’t happen to be almost forty-four minutes long. And I’m talking pithy and unique songs, the best of which made seventies FM radio a happier place. But eccentric that he is he didn’t manage to come up with enough radio-ready classics to fill a greatest hits compilation, which is at least in part what makes 1976’s M.U. – The Best of Jethro Tull so interesting.

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Celebrating Elton John on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

“Ridicule,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the tribute paid to genius by mediocrities.” Such would seem to be the case with one Sir Elton Hercules John. Esteemed critic Robert Christgau once wrote him off as a “puling phony,” while Charles Shaar Murray dismissed him as “Elton Schmelton.” Even John understood he lacked respect, and jokingly told Murray, “I’m gonna become a rock’n’roll suicide, take my nasty out and piddle all over the front row, just to get rid of my staid old image.”

Elton never carried through on his threat, probably because he was too busy writing brilliant songs, more than I can count on my six hands even. Besides, who needs critical respect after scoring seven consecutive No. 1 albums in the U.S. between 1972 and 1975—a feat not even the Fab Four could beat? During those golden years, which extended from Honky Chateau to Rock of the Westies, John (in collaboration with lyricist Bernie Taupin) churned out hits like a one-man Brill Building, and many of them will still be around long after mankind is gone, leaving our groovy ape successors to do the Crocodile Rock.

John’s high-water mark as a songwriter was 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I consider it Elton’s masterpiece, even if The Evil One, Robert Christgau, dismissed it as “one more double album that would make a nifty single.” A concept album of sorts, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road takes a bittersweet look at a lost past, from its film stars to its dance crazes to its bovver boys in their braces and boots looking to mix it up on Saturday night.

Perhaps the most astounding thing about John’s unprecedented success is that he achieved it with Bernie Taupin—a mediocre lyricist at best, and the fourth place finisher in a 3rd grade poetry competition at worst—as a collaborator. Not only is Taupin the mook who wrote “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/In fact it’s cold as hell/And there’s no one there to raise them/If you did,” it’s his lyrical DNA police found all over Starship’s “We Built This City,” a song so unfathomably dumb it makes Jon Anderson’s “A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace/And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace” sound like Shakespeare. That said, his lyrics on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road are shockingly unterrible, and a few of them are actually quite good.

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Celebrating Patterson Hood, born on this day in 1964. —Ed.

Hot damn, I loves me some Drive-By Truckers. Anybody who’s ever seen ‘em knows they put on a kick-ass live show, and anybody who’s ever heard 2001’s Southern Rock Opera knows that it’s one of the most ambitious and brilliant concept albums ever recorded, period. And it includes one of the best love songs ever written to rock’n’roll, “Let There Be Rock,” which covers all the bases from Molly Hatchet to Bon Scott to Lynyrd Skynyrd and “The Boys Are Back in Town,” to say nothing of freaking out on acid at a Blue Oyster Cult concert, an event that I include on my own rock’n’roll resume.

Since then they’ve continued to release strong album after strong album, and this despite personnel changes including the defections of both the multi-talented Jason Isbell and Shonna Tucker, she of the amazing voice. And have I mentioned they have impeccable taste in covers? Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Kiss, Tom T. Hall—why, they even cover Warren Zevon’s fiery “Play It All Night Long” and beat him, no sweat piss jizz or blood about it, at his own game.

Drive-By Truckers have always written smart songs, and many of them have been protest songs, on everything from the ruthless machinations of rapacious corporations to the murders of those four little black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by the KKK in 1963 to the still very much alive specter of hate-monger George Wallace, but on their newly released LP American Band they go all out, tackling such hot button issues as police shootings of young black men, school massacres, and gun control in general.

Hardly what one would expect from a bunch of southern boys who sound very much like southern boys, but then again it was Lynyrd Skynyrd, those paragons of the Confederate flag-waving southland (and the chief characters in the cast of Southern Rock Opera) who had the chutzpah to condemn Saturday night specials. And who sang “Boo! Boo!” in reference to segretionist Alabama governor George Wallace while they were at it.

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Remembering Klaus Dinger, born on this day in 1946. —Ed.

I’ve always loved Neu!; theirs is the relentless and steady as she goes “motorik” sound of a BMW stolen by the outlaw Baader-Meinhof Gang speeding down the Autobahn, on their way to West Berlin to create mischief and mayhem.

Formed in 1971 in Düsseldorf by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, both of whom were former members of Kraftwerk, Neu! was one of the founders of Krautrock, utilizing the simplistic 4/4 motorik (i.e., “motor skill”) beat (which Dinger chose to label the “Apache beat”) to propel their songs while dispensing with all kinds of useless stuff like verses and choruses and the like. Meanwhile Rother accompanied Dinger’s drumming with a guitar-produced harmonic drone, utilizing a single chord upon which he would pile overdub upon overdub to emphasize timbral change.

Not that I know what any of that means, but I don’t have to, because I’m no musician but just a guy with ears, two of them to be exact, one of which works better than the other due to a tragic Q-tip accident. The important thing is that Neu! influenced everyone from David Bowie to John Lydon, to say nothing of Stereolab (natch) and even Oasis. The results of Neu!’s innovations were simultaneously lulling and exciting; theirs was the sound of minimal variation at high velocity.

Neu! ’75 followed 1972’s Neu! and 1973’s Neu! 2, and was significantly different from those records in so far as Dinger and Rother had begun to take divergent paths. In the end they compromised, with side one highlighting Rother’s ambient leanings and side two spotlighting Dinger’s more feral rock, which could almost be called proto-punk. The resulting LP is a Jekyll and Hyde proposition, but it works, in exactly the same way as David Bowie’s Neu!-influenced Low LP does.

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Remembering Vivian Stanshall, born on this date in 1943. —Ed.

I am tempted to call The Bonzo Dog Band (or the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, take your pick) the greatest group in the history of rock. And this despite the fact that they only occasionally got around to playing what could be called a rock song. They were too far too busy cracking themselves up with their hilarious, brilliantly surreal, and utterly deranged wit. If Monty Python had turned to music full-time, they might—although I honestly doubt it—have been as funny as The Bonzo Dog Band.

The genre-hopping mobile insane asylum that was The Bonzo Dog Band might throw anything at you: trad jazz, oldies covers, bizarre street interviews with perplexed normals, and parodies, heaps of parodies—of thirties songs, music hall songs, fifties songs, blues songs, hard-rock songs, psychedelic songs—you name it. And they were excellent musicians—when they wanted to be—with a genius for arranging songs. Your average Bonzo tune may sound anarchic, but you can be certain it was put together with an exacting eye for detail, and every detail is in its right place.

There’s really no one to compare The Bonzo Dog Band with except Frank Zappa, and the comparison is a poor one. Zappa’s humor was sneering and juvenile; his Brit counterparts favored an intelligent and good-natured Dadaism. Just check out “The Intro and the Outro,” a parody of a band introduction that grows stranger and stranger as it goes on, with the announcer snazzily saying, “And looking very relaxed on vibes, Adolf Hitler… niiiice” and “Representing the flower people, Quasimodo, on bells.” No yellow snow here.

Formed in London in 1962 as a trad jazz band, The Bonzo Dog Band’s core line-up included the mad and brilliant Vivian “Ginger Geezer” Stanshall on trumpet and lead vocals; the equally demented Neil Innes on piano, guitar, and lead vocals; Rodney “Rhino” Desborough Slater on saxophone; Roger Ruskin Spear on tenor saxophone and assorted mad sound-producing contraptions, including the trouser press and “Theremin leg”; Dennis Cowan on drums and vocals; and the legendary “Legs” Larry Smith—the tap dancer extraordinaire who played one of rock’s few tap solos on Elton John’s “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself”—on drums.

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Remembering Jerry Reed, born on this day in 1937. —Ed.

A guitar picker extraordinaire and redneck comedian whose songs could almost be called funky, the late Jerry “Alabama Wild Man” Reed is one of my favorite country artists. Me, I’d love him if he’d never cut anything but “East Bound and Down” (the theme song of Smokey and the Bandit!), “Amos Moses,” and “The Preacher and the Bear,” a hilarious tale of an unfortunate meeting in the woods between a preacher hunting on the Sabbath and a grizzly bear that ends with the preacher up a tree and praying to his Lord, “I mean/Look at how he’s lookin’ at me/Does the word ‘fast food’ mean anything to you, Lord?/Oh, he’s hairy/And he’s still thinkin’/And he’s lookin’ at me like I… smell good!”

The man’s usual mode was high-spirited, and he had a knack for what you could call novelty tunes, but he was also capable of singing about the more lugubrious aspects of life; you know, broken hearts and all that. But I much preferred him at his wildest and woolliest, as did Robert Christgau, who called him “a great crazy,” and said apropos his more saccharine tunes, “He couldn’t sell soap to a hippie’s mother” and “RCA should ban the ballad.” Me, I hadn’t listened to him for years when my girlfriend gave me a truly terrible ‘70s compilation CD redeemed only by R. Dean Taylor’s great “Indiana Wants Me” and Reed’s fantastic swamp tall tale, “Amos Moses,” which is one of the songs on the 2000 best-of compilation, Jerry Reed Visits Hit Row.

Fiddle-driven opener “East Bound and Down” is a bootlegger’s anthem and smooth as Jim Beam Single Barrel bourbon, and includes a great solo by Reed. It speeds along like an 18-wheeler on the run from Smokey, and if you think it’s a bit slick, well, all I can say is all those thirsty boys in Atlanta don’t agree. “Amos Moses” is a funky tune about a Cajun alligator poacher, mean as a snake on account of his old man, who used the young Moses as alligator bait. He’s got one arm on account of a hungry gator, most likely killed a sheriff trying to track him down in the bayou, and the only thing cooler than his biography are Reed’s righteous guitar picking and distinctive voice, which are as good old boy as you can get.

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Remembering Wilson Pickett, born on this day in 1941. —Ed.

Hear ye hear ye: I am going to begin this review of Alabama native son Wilson Pickett’s 1969 LP Hey Jude by stating right off that the title cut is one of the most phenomenal songs ever recorded, and is in fact so great I would probably give this album an A even if every other song on it was a jingle for a cereal commercial.

Pickett, whom I consider the best screamer in the history of soul and R&B, if not rock too, lays into “Hey Jude” like somebody just chopped his foot off with a hatchet, while the horn section kicks ass and Duane Allman, who was just beginning his career as a session musician, tears off one of the most brilliant and in-your-face guitar solos you’ll ever hear. It’s a bravura performance, “Hey Jude,” and supernatural in its greatness, and if I die tomorrow I will die having heard a sound so pleasing to God that he decided (I’ve talked to him about this) to push the date of the Last Judgment back a hundred years or so.

Fortunately Pickett fills out the album with a bunch of other songs that, while they can’t (what could?) compare with “Hey Jude,” are excellent in their own right. His voice is a miracle, his screams make Joe Cocker sound like a pee wee leaguer, and in short he turns in a whole slew of superb performances, demonstrating his mastery of phrasing and the wild scream even on those songs (his unfortunate take on Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild,” the gospel-flavored but not very exciting “People Make the World,” and the funky but unhappily titled “Toe Hold”) that don’t quite measure up to the rest of the songs on the album.

Putting Pickett, Allman, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (the so-called Swampers), and some great horn players together in the studio was a stroke of genius on Atlantic Records honcho Jerry Wexler’s part, and it paid off in a royal flush as the bunch of ‘em simply could not fail to turn an okay song into a great one.

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Robert Christgau once wrote, in the midst of a think piece about one of California’s chief 1970s exports, “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them.” I hate them too, but what’s more interesting is that I hate them while liking (or even loving) some of their music, which seems downright perverse. You’re supposed to LIKE the bands who make music that you like. That’s the natural order of things. The Eagles force you to do the unnatural, and doing the unnatural makes you uncomfortable.

If I had the same problem with the Red Hot Chili Peppers I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I’d jump off a bridge.

This is why 1978’s The Long Run is the perfect Eagles album. It’s their worst album, for sure, an abomination in fact, but at long last Eagle haters such as myself found their hatred of the Eagles themselves—and Glenn Frey and Don Henley in particular—in perfect alignment with their hatred of the Eagles’ music. I loved Hotel California, and talk about your cognitive dissonance—I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.

The Long Run I loathed, and I finally knew peace. It was easy to loathe The Long Run, because it’s a bad, bad album, full of songs that made it starkly apparent that the Eagles—the most arrogant and reptilian frozen noses in an LA scene full of arrogant and reptilian frozen noses—had finally run their long course.

There are several decent songs on The Long Run, but none of them come within Lear jet distance of their best work. I’m don’t listen to them. And there are songs on The Long Run that defy description. Throwaways like “Teenage Jail” and “The Disco Strangler” plumb abysses of utter suckitude that even the band’s biggest detractors never dreamed the Eagles had in them.

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Remembering Phil Lesh in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

How many Deadheads does it take to change a light bulb? Six hundred and one. One to score the acid, and the other six hundred to stare slackjawed at the dead bulb and say, “Looks lit to me, man.” I know, it’s a shitty joke, but there’s some truth in it. The chief problem with Deadheads has always been their lack of quality control. They see no difference between 1970’s brilliant American Beauty and 1978’s execrable Shakedown Street, and lack the discernment to recognize that the light of creative genius that illuminated the Grateful Dead at the dawn of the seventies had long since flickered out by the time Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995.

Drug burn-out was the culprit, that and the natural order of the rock creativity; virtually no one continues to make great album after great album—shit, by my accounting, even Bob Dylan did his best work between 1965 and 1967, and that’s if you count The Basement Tapes, which weren’t released until years later.

As for the Dead, I think they did their best work between 1969 and 1972, when they released the lackluster Wake of the Flood, which a true fan, Robert Christgau, described as “capturing that ruminative, seemingly aimless part of the concert when the boogiers nod out.” As for when their live concerts finally settled into equal parts boredom and cult worship, I have no opinion, although I will say that the three shows I saw in the eighties were perfunctory and the Dead appeared to wish they were somewhere else.

Ah, but at their best they were sublime. My personal favorite is 1970’s Workingman’s Dead, but that same year’s American Beauty is a close second. On both LPs the Dead abandoned their free-form extended jams (1969’s Live/Dead had two sides with one song on them, and one side with two songs on it) for real songs, and on both they proved that they had plenty of great four-minute songs in them. As for American Beauty, it was prettier than Workingman’s Dead—a folk-rock LP that eschewed the doom-laden songs on its predecessor for songs that were, for lack of a better phrase, sunnier and more pastoral.

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Celebrating Greg Norton, born on this day in 1959. —Ed.

Lookee here; I didn’t become the world’s foremost rock critic (in my mind, baby, in my mind!) by keeping my crackpot opinions to myself. No, I share them with everybody, because the way I look at it, why should I suffer for my art when you can do it for me?

Anyway, I’ve been listening to Minneapolis hardcore kings Hüsker Dü for the first time in several decades, and it is my infallible critical opinion that the trio of guitarist Bob Mould, drummer Grant Hart, and bassist Greg Norton (of the great handlebar mustache) commenced to go downhill the moment they ditched legendary SST record producer Spot—who got a bad rap, in my opinion, for his murky productions—in favor of handling the production duties themselves.

Sure, they cleaned up their sound and made it more pristine, but I loved Spot’s murk, because it lent every album he produced an aura of post-punk primitivism and disdain for the sparkling productions of every artist not part of the hardcore community. His was the DIY sound of the hardcore underground, and I am of the opinion that the three albums Hüsker Dü produced after giving poor Spot his walking papers (i.e., 1985’s Flip Your Wig, 1986’s Candy Apple Grey, and 1987’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories) are polished to the point of sterility. Not for nothing did I stop listening to Hüsker Dü after their high-water mark, 1985’s Spot-produced New Day Rising, which was about the time they were poised to break through big time thanks to their heavy presence on college radio.

Me, I’m still attached to their “Metal Circus” EP, on which Hüsker Dü first began to differentiate themselves from hardcore’s fast and hard ethos. Nobody ever played it faster and harder than they did on their 1980 debut, the appropriately titled “Land Speed Record” EP, but by the time they released 1983’s “Metal Circus” they were introducing harmony and melody into their tunes, especially on the Grant Hart contributions, “It’s Not Funny Anymore” and “Diane.”

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Celebrating Tom Scholz, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Boston: Home of the Boston Tea Party! And Boston baked beans! But who gives a shit? Boston is first and foremost the home of Boston, the “corporate rock band” that sold like 80 billion copies of its first album, 1976’s eponymous Boston, thanks to its power pop melodies, Brad Delp’s histrionic vocals, band mastermind’s Tom Scholz’s big guitar, and a production job that was slick as jizz thanks to Scholz’s notorious perfectionism—he once made his drummer play the kick drum some 18,000 times because it “Just didn’t sound perfect”—which gave the album the luster and sheen of a fresh-off-the-line Lamborghini. I mean, this baby was so slick you could hardly hold onto it long enough to put it on your record player.

But it sounded great back in 1976, even though I can remember debating with friends over whether Scholz was playing an actual guitar or some synthesized approximation of such, that’s how good his guitar sounded. Me, I loved it when Boston came out, and it still makes me nostalgic because it was the first LP I ever got high to—with my friend Dave beneath the Littlestown Railroad Bridge, and on 8-track no less.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Boston’s debut is that, despite its reputation for over-production, it was actually recorded for several thousand dollars—a pittance in those days. This is largely because Scholz recorded the bulk of the album in his tiny home studio in Watertown, Massachusetts, sidestepping Epic, which wanted the LP to be recorded in a professional studio. In addition, he recorded the acoustic guitar parts with a $100 Yamaha guitar.

No matter what you think of the LP—within two years the albums sounded unbearably slick to my ears, and I wondered why I’d ever loved it—there is no denying genius of the sheer guitar histrionics and cool riff that make “More Than a Feeling” a staple of FM radio, or that chorus for god’s sake. Boston’s lyrics were never better than mediocre, although they touch on universal teen themes. On the hard-charging “Peace of Mind,” for example, Delp utters the trite lines, “People living in competition/All I want is my peace of mind,” but by god the words sound good coming out of his mouth, especially with Scholz’s guitar roaring behind him.

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