Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Nigel Olsson on his 77th birthday. —Ed.

Fanatical Elton John fans—and I’m one of them—frequently get into knife fights over which is the better album, 1974’s Elton John’s Greatest Hits or 1977’s Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume II. I prefer the former—and have the scars to prove it—for three reasons: 1) It was the album that began my love affair with the guy; 2) it more clearly delineates the metamorphosis of Elton from singer-songwriter nebbish to Glitter extrovert Captain Fantastic; and 3) it has “Rocket Man,” Glam’s Jester King’s signature song on it.

But you would have to be some kind of hideous deep sea creature to deny the brilliance of the majority of the songs on Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume II. The trouble—for me anyway—is that it includes three songs I don’t much care for as well as the straggler “Levon” from 1971’s Madman Across the Water, which rightfully should have been included along with the earlier material on Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume 1.

But it’s an essential compilation nonetheless, because it includes three singles you won’t find on any of Elton’s studio LPs and one (a cover of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard”) you’ll find only on the 1975 soundtrack of Tommy. I don’t much care for the Bicentennial Year keepsake “Philadelphia Freedom” (those sweeping disco strings irk me) or the perky Motown-inspired duet with Kiki Dee “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” not so much because they’re bad songs (they’re not) but because say what you will about lyricist Bernie Taupin he’s always been an oddball (give a listen to “Solar Prestige a Gammon”) with an eye for detail (check out “Bennie and the Jets”).

Neither are on display on the pedestrian “Philadelphia Freedom” or “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” But if you want them and don’t own the singles this is where you’ll find them. I’m not much of a fan of the lugubrious “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” from his 1976 depression opus Blue Moves either, because it lacks the soaring majesty of heartbreak songs like “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” which you’ll find on Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume 1.

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Remembering Fred Smith. —Ed.

Sometimes I flabbergast myself. I think I know what I like and what I don’t like, only to find out I don’t know a damn thing about anything, least of all my likes and dislikes. Take KC and the Sunshine Band. I hated them with a passion for like 30 years and now I think they’re great. Or Elton John’s Caribou, which I liked for like 80 years only to realize just yesterday it only has two good songs on it, although to Captain Fantastic’s credit they’re two really great songs.

But occasionally I get it right the first time, as with Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” which I hated when it came out and still hate to this day. And the same goes for Television’s sophomore LP, 1978’s Adventure. People—as in every sentient human breathing air the year it came out—wrote Adventure off as a lackluster follow-up to the band’s 1977 debut, Marquee Moon. Everybody but me, that is. Because I had never heard of Marquee Moon. I didn’t even know it existed. Hell, I can’t even remember how or why I came to buy Adventure, because I had no clue as to who Television was and absolutely no inkling that they were an integral part of a musical revolution in progress at a ratty club in New York City called CBGBs.

But buy it I did, just as I bought Kill City without having ever heard the Stooges, which just goes to show you how isolating rural living was back in the days before the internet gave you access to all kinds of information, including who was who on the rock circuit. About all you got exposed to back in those days were hoof and mouth disease and square dancing, which is why I spent my teen years doing my level best to do as many drugs as I could get my greedy paws on, while trying to wrap my vehicle around a utility pole, which I finally accomplished on March 1, 1980. You’ve got to have goals, even in the boondocks, or life isn’t worth a damn.

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Serendipity, hell—what we have here is a miracle. On a November day in 1969, soul shouter Wilson Pickett, members of the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and a little-known blues guitarist named Duane Allman found themselves at a former tobacco warehouse turned recording studio at 603 East Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

What happened at FAME Studios on that day in November is the stuff of legend, and what happened after that is even more the stuff of legend, but suffice it to say that the little-known guitarist would suggest to the soul shouter that The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” might make for a great cover. “Wicked Pickett” had no reservations about recording pop material—the 1968 Hey Jude LP included a (hardly memorable) cover of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” which he released as a single, and his 1970 album Right On would include covers of the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” and the ubiquitous “Hey Joe.”

They might have seemed like an unlikely pairing—the Detroit (by way of Alabama) hard soul vet responsible for such immortal songs as “In the Midnight Hour,” “Land of 1000 Dances,” “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.),” “Mustang Sally,” “Funky Broadway,” “Engine No. 9,” and “Don’t Knock My Love,” and the blues slide guitarist whose biggest claim to fame up until that time was playing with Hour Glass, a failed pop band that once set Edgar Allan Poe’s “Bells” to music. It’s worse than you think it is.

But something happened in FAME studios during those sessions. Pickett and Allman clicked. Allman’s stinging licks on “Toe Hold” could be the best thing about the song, and he’s all over the superfunky and horn-heavy “My Own Style of Loving.” And Pickett doesn’t sing so much as throw punches.

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Charanjit Singh is a fascinating character. So fascinating, I don’t even know where to start. The Indian musician and composer led a wedding band, produced instrumental elevator music, played guitar, bass, keyboards, and synthesizers on the soundtracks of literally hundreds of Bollywood movies, and once held off a pack of hungry wolves with nothing but a VCR copy of O.P. Goyle’s 1973 Hindi-language film Bandhe Hath.

Okay, so I made up that last part. But Singh is credited with introducing synthesizers into Bollywood film scores, making him a pioneer. But what makes him even more of an innovator is his 1982 debut LP Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, which didn’t sell (despite its supercool cover) but was rediscovered years later, and (thanks in particular to his pioneering use of the Roland TB-303) led to his being called “the Father of Acid House.”

It’s an odd fusion, raga and disco, and if 1982 seems like rather a late date to be putting out ANY disco LP, it wasn’t in India, where Pakistani pop singer Nazia Hassan and Indian producer Biddu in particular set the spark to a thriving electronic disco scene—Saturday Night Fever set to a Bollywood beat. But it was Singh who explored the possibilities of combining raga and disco music, with a dollop of Bollywood filmi music thrown in.

Singh had a kind of mystico-electronica experience when he discovered synthesizers, and specifically the Roland Corporation’s Jupiter-8 (“an 8-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer,” whatever that means), the TR-808 drum machine, and the TB-303 bass synthesizer. It was like he discovered LSD, but you had to plug it in.

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Remembering Alex Harvey, born on this day in 1935. —Ed.

What the fuck is this? Glam hangers-on The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were a uniquely Scottish phenomenon, trainspotting and pronouncing the word “garage” the way Elton John does in his song “Levon.” Which is just another way of saying that hardly anybody in the U.S. of A. outside of Cleveland ever laid ears on ‘em, much less considered ‘em sensational.

And small wonder, because the Sensational Alex Harvey Band were simply too esoteric gonzo in the grand tradition of unapologetic English eccentrics for mass consumption. Pub rock heroes with progressive rock tendencies who weren’t afraid to shamelessly camp it up for the Glitter kids, SAHB liked to keep the punters guessing, as 1973’s Next demonstrates.

On the band’s sophomore LP you get some Mott rock, a faux-snakeskin swamp blues, an esoteric hoodoo jive number called “Vambo Marble Eye,” some straight-up Glam Rock, and a couple of numbers so completely over the top flamboyant they make David Bowie and Gary Glitter look like wallflowers. Fact is I’ve never heard anything like ‘em outside the canons of Jobriath, Meatloaf, and Morrissey.

All of which to say is that Alex Harvey and Company were some twisted people, as their madcap live shows proved. Superhero costumes, props, you name it–these anything goes eclectitions (a word I just made up!) put every bit as much outré energy into their stage act as Alice Cooper or Jethro Tull, and their fanatical UK cult following adored them for it.

The LP opens on a cheesy blues note with piano stomper “Swampsnake”–on which Harvey plays some very ornery harmonica and does some serious over-emoting–before taking a very “whatever were they thinking?” wrong turn with “Gang Bang,” which sounds like your standard Mott the Hoople pub rocker but flunks every known morality test with its chorus “Ain’t nothing like a gang bang/To blow away the blues.”

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Celebrating Lol Tolhurst on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

How close-minded am I? I’ll tell you. When my girlfriend asked me about The Cure I told her I wasn’t really familiar with much more than their megahits. When she went on to suggest I’d like them, I told her, “Sure, about as much as I’d like to have railroad spikes driven into my eyes.”

But love is blind—having railroad spikes driven into your eyes will do that—so I agreed solely on her behalf to give the legendarily mopey Robert Smith, who has always struck me as Morrissey minus the saving sense of ironic wit—and Company a listen. And gosh darn it if I didn’t find I liked them. They weren’t the unremitting bummer I expected, which I should have known from having heard the great “Just Like Heaven” and “Friday I’m in Love.”

Sure, Smith can be a downer. But the Cure weren’t just jauntier than I anticipated; they were also tougher. The introspective Smith may be the least likely pugilist this side of Brian Eno, but his braggadocio on “Fight,” the closing cut of 1987’s double LP Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, proves he knows his way around a pair of brass knuckles. The same goes for the king snake of a tune that is “The Snake Pit,” a savage and ponderous drone of a tune that will slither right off the stereo and bite you, as well as for the guitar-heavy opening cut “The Kiss,” on which Smith spits bile and vitriol, mostly to the effect of “I wish you were dead.” Which rhymes wonderfully with “Get your fucking voice out of my head.”

As I mentioned, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is a double LP, and like most double albums contains its share of filler. Like the “funky” “Hot Hot Hot!!!,” which one critic cryptically labeled “a tragedy of trenchfoot” before concluding that even he knew Smith has “better stuff hidden in that mop of his.” Meanwhile, the vaguely Indian-tinged “Like Cockatoos” is a bore, while the exotic drums and sax of “Icing Sugar” promise much but fail to deliver. As for “Torture” it’s aptly named, and not even its big drug thump and all Smith’s warbling and wailing can hide its lack of a catchy melody.

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Celebrating Ross Valory on his 77th birthday. —Ed.

Some random thoughts on Journey’s 1981 blockbuster LP Escape:

1. Remember that final, 2007 episode of The Sopranos with the open ending that everybody hated, the one where Tony and family are sitting in the diner and you don’t know whether Tony gets whacked or not? Well, what pissed me off was not knowing whether Tony lived or died. What bugged me was that the booth jukebox was playing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Tony’s kid, a teen from the year 2007 who had never shown any symptoms of being a congenital idiot, never said “What is this shit?” Any normal rebellious teen male from the year 2007 would have said “What is this shit?” but Tony’s kid didn’t SAY shit. Ruined the entire episode for me.

2. I don’t think Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is shit. I USED to think it was shit, thought it was shit for decades, but then something horrible happened, I had a brain aneurysm or something, and now I love it. I love it! This has happened to me with other bands and other songs and maybe it’s a function of growing old and senile but believe me, it’s disturbing. I’ve always considered myself a person of taste, although I’ve also always liked Black Oak Arkansas and Foghat while despising the likes of Patti Smith and The Clash, so that’s debatable. But Journey? Journey is no grey area. When a person tells me they like Journey I give that person the stink eye and write that person out of the Book of Life. Journey is the enemy.

3. On a completely random note, Escape’s cover falls into the great Boston/Electric Light Orchestra tradition of album covers with spaceships on them escaping Earth because who doesn’t want to escape Earth, especially if you’re a teen and your parents are hard-ons and school may as well be Leavenworth and what’s the point of growing up anyway? To get a job? To go bald and get married and STOP smoking pot? Life HAS to be better in another galaxy!

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Celebrating Al McKay on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Of all the things I’ve loved during my tenure on this planet, it’s hard to beat Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White. And not because he’s a musical genius and head honcho of one of the Seventies’ best soul/funk outfits. No, I love him because he’s the guy who sings, “Yowl!” on several occasions on the great “That’s the Way of the World.” They never fail to thrill me, those yowls, not since I was a young sprog and loved the hell out of MFSB’s “T.S.O.P.”

EWF’s songs dominated Top 40 radio when I was young, because unlike Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament/Funkadelic they were unapologetically middle of the road. But that doesn’t mean that their songs weren’t great, just that they were more like the black equivalent of Elton John than, say, Randy Newman. As the critic Robert Christgau noted about one of their prime LPs, “Most of these songs are fun to listen to. But they’re still MOR–the only risk they take is running headlong into somebody coming down the middle of the road in the opposite direction. Like The Carpenters.”

But so what? Earth, Wind & Fire have produced their fair share of timeless songs, and if they’re slick, the slickness works. Under the direction of White, EWF’s drummer, songwriter, and vocalist, the band’s sound was—and still is—an eclectic brew of funk, jazz, gospel, rock, smooth soul, blues, folk, African music, and disco, and what made them particularly remarkable were their group vocals, and especially the vocals of Maurice White and Philip Bailey.

Unrelentingly positive, their songs were a balm for the soul, and I for one think “That’s the Way of the World” is a slice of mystical brilliance and a song for the ages. All of those vocalists throwing in; it’s a sound so soulful I sprout an Afro every time I listen to it. And their horn section, the four-member Phenix Horns, also merits special attention; one listen to the opening of “Shining Star” and you know you’re in the presence of genius.

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Celebrating Mark Eitzel on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

Mark Eitzel, American music’s poet laureate of the alcoholic undertow, has never gotten his props. During his time with his band American Music Club he put out a number of great albums, each one more besotted than the last, and managed to write what I consider the best song (by far!) of the nineties, “Johnny Mathis’ Feet.”

So what if he brutalized me in comments following a review I wrote of a show at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. What really hurt was his saying, “If I’m as down as you say I am – then what gives you the right to kick me?” I wasn’t kicking you, Mark, I love you man—I was just unhappy that you were moving in the direction of stripped down torch songs.

Ah, but that’s bourbon under the bridge. I will always consider Eitzel a genius, what with his way of both bumming you out and making you laugh with his songs about himself and his burned-out friends. He can turn a phrase and has a surgeon’s eye for just where to put the scalpel in, and these gifts are, I think, on best display on 1991’s Everclear.

It led Rolling Stone magazine to declare Eitzel the Songwriter of the Year in 1991, but didn’t up his band’s exposure any; as Eitzel sadly noted later, “The next show there were about 20 people in the audience. And they were army guys and they thought American Music Club were some righteous American freedom-fighting, cool ass Springsteen-influenced Guns N’ Roses kind of guys. And we did not rock.”

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I can think of a dozen reasons to recoil when the name Howard Jones comes up, and they’re all good reasons. The wonderful thing about Howard Jones is that there are no bad reasons to recoil when the name Howard Jones comes up.

His ho-hum low-rent music, his shallow and platitude-laden lyrics, his repellently vapid take on everything based on his muddled and cringe-worthy world view—Howard Jones is the synthpop bottom of the barrel. Not surprisingly, he’s sold millions of records.

Here are just some of the many reasons to hide when Howard Jones is mentioned. I’ve mainly focused on Jones’ 1984 debut LP, Human’s Lib. They are as follows:

Early in his career, Jones thought it would be a grand idea to perform with a mime. Remarkably, neither Jones nor the mime was killed or even tarred and feathered. But no one has ever said life is fair.

Human’s Lib went to No. 1 on the UK Pop Charts. See Sentence #2 above.

The sheer number of critics who jostled, punched, scraped, and picked up machetes and crossbows to fight and slash their way to the front of the line when it came to saying cruel things about Human’s Lib is impressive. For example:

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Celebrating Seth Justman on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

A few words on the evolution of this review: I originally intended to write about 1977’s Foghat Live because I consider it the best live album this side of Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1964 Live at the Star Club, Hamburg, which I love even more than Roxy Music’s 1976 Viva! Roxy Music, which is guaranteed to make your ears clasp their tiny little hands and say, “Glam bam thank you ma’am!”

But then my friend Hank Dittmar who has forgotten more about music than I’ll ever know recommended this 1972 live album by the J. Geils Band, whom I saw at Shippensburg College in the late seventies but can’t really remember seeing at Shippensburg College in the late seventies because I was totally blotto on a combination of Wild Turkey and Placidyl, the latter of which I can only describe as an industrial strength memory dissolvent.

So I decided to review “Live Full House and let me tell you I’m glad I did. It ain’t Jerry Lee Lewis and it ain’t Roxy Music but man do the J. Geils Band cook. They mainly stick to the rock and R&B basics but they infuse what are of course a couple of formulas as old as the hills with so much passion you’ll find yourself jumping up and down and screaming along with Peter Wolf who can really shout ‘em out for a white boy. And when he’s not busy emoting, Magic Dick who is my second favorite Dick in rock’n’roll behind Handsome Dick Manitoba, is busy honkadonkin’ up a storm on the old harpoon. Just check out his set piece “Whammer Jammer” if you don’t believe me.

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Celebrating Corky Laing on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Leslie West is a heavy guy. He weighs like 1,000 lbs and plays heavy music and called his band Mountain because mountains are very heavy, and his song “Mississippi Queen” is so heavy it has to be carried from gig to gig in a specially made truck of the sort the U.S. Army uses to transport intercontinental ballistic missiles. And forget about vinyl. Mountain was so heavy they released their 1970 debut on concrete. It weighed 42 pounds and crushed a whole lot of record players.

Lots of folks dismissed Mountain (West on guitar and vocals, Felix Pappalardi on bass and vocals, Corky Laing on drums, and Steve Knight on keyboards) as Long Island’s answer to Cream, and on songs like “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” “For Yasgur’s Farm,” “The Laird,” and “Boys in the Band” the resemblance is striking. But on Climbing! Mountain escapes their Cream fetish to produce songs as humongous as the whale you keep expecting to show up in “Nantucket Sleighride,” except he never does.

Given Mountain’s reputation as the heaviest beast to ever slouch out of Long Island, Climbing! is far more diverse than you’d expect. Sure, you get some nifty Godzilla stomp along the lines of “Mississippi Queen.” But the band also flirts with acid-prog of the sort that won’t wreak havoc on your tweeters, and tosses in a couple of genre-benders that defy all known ethnomusicological definition. In short, Mountain was no one-trick mastodon.

The band’s division of vocal duties further lent diversity to Mountain’s sound. West’s rhino snort contrasts nicely with Pappalardi’s Jack Bruce, and the duo delegates lead vocal chores accordingly–West sings the speaker-busters, Pappalardi the more Cream-influenced tracks.

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Before we get around to talking about the stupid band New Order’s dumb 1982 EP “1981-Factus 8-1982,” please allow me to say that one of the things I force myself to do as a responsible music critic is what I call Prejudice Testing. This entails my listening to the music of a contemptible band or musical artist I’ve loathed for decades without going to the unnecessary effort of actually listening to them.

The completely lame English band New Order is such a band. My reasons for not listening to New Order were two-fold. One, they were, as we all know, just Joy Division without Ian Curtis, and seeing as how Ian Curtis is the only reason I liked Joy Division, why bother listening to the riff-raff behind him?

They were bound to suck, and in my mind, the best thing they could have done after Curtis’ death was give up music and take desk jobs at a travel agency. Two, it was my understanding that New Order specialized in a smarty-pants species of synthesizer-heavy dance music, which has never been my idea of a good time. And they didn’t sound like much fun, which is the only reason I listen to synthesizer-heavy dance music in the first place. Be brainless or go home, that’s always been my philosophy.

In most cases, my Prejudice Testing confirms my long-held and completely ignorant distaste. Nick Cave really is the pompous windbag and Lazarus-voiced poet manque of modern rock; the music of Oingo Boingo is as dumb as its name; and The The are indeed boring boring. And I could go on.

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Waking up one morning and realizing you like Journey is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. I should know—it happened to me. One day, I hated Journey like I’d hated Journey for literally over four decades. So how was it I found myself clutching a copy of the band’s 1978 LP Infinity to my bosom and saying, “I love you, Journey, don’t ever leave me, please somebody kill me”?

It was horrible. Journey represented everything I despised—late-Seventies/early eighties MOR commercial rock I couldn’t even laugh at, the way I could, say, their San Francisco compatriots, Starship. They weren’t the punch line to a joke—they were simply one of those bands whose songs you can’t turn off fast enough when they come on the car radio. And yet here I was, heart in my throat every time I heard “Wheel in the Sky.”

The whole turn of events was a cosmic jest at my expense, and who could be responsible but God himself? If so, this was some Old Testament-level shit. God took everything from Job, but at least he spared the poor fuck the indignity of becoming a Journey fan.

Then I found myself wondering if the cause wasn’t closer to home—literally. Shortly before I woke up a Journey fan, I’d purchased a Journey tour poster as a purely ironic gesture and hung it on my wall. It was for a gig at the Offenbach Stadthalle during their Departure to Europe World Tour ‘80.

It was one confusing name for a tour, but that’s not the point. What I was forced to ask myself was, had that poster cast some kind of sinister voodoo spell on me? Literally infected me with a Journey virus? Had I inexplicably purchased a CURSED JOURNEY POSTER?

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Celebrating Jim Stafford on his 82nd birthday. —Ed.

The list of famous country novelty songs is a long one. There have been hundreds–probably thousands–of them. Just off the top of my head: Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” Loretta Lynn’s “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” Mark Chesnutt’s “Bubba Shot the Jukebox,” and my dad’s all-time favorite (he sang it all the time), Mac Davis’ “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” Any half-decent country fan could reel off dozens more.

But when it comes to country novelty tune artists, Jim Stafford could just be the king. I grew up listening to “Spiders & Snakes,” “Wildwood Weed,” and “I Got Stoned and I Missed It,” and while I’d never kissed a girl or smoked a joint in my life, I loved the obvious spirit of fun behind all of ‘em.

Stafford has released only three albums, and since 1990 he’s dedicated his energy to operating and performing at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri (no vanity there, and by the way: should you find yourself in Branson, be sure to stop by Dolly Partons’ Stampede!). Don’t know if he’s plain lazy or doesn’t need the money, but Stafford hasn’t released an LP since 1993. (He has done some acting; he played the role of Buford in 1984’s immortal Bloodsucker from Outer Space.)

Jim Stafford spawned four Top 40 hits, and if there’s one word to describe the LP it’s versatility. You get some swamp rock, a faux-lounge number, a couple of good ole’ country numbers, a blues parody, a rockabilly pastiche, and a couple of songs that pack what can only be described as a hard rock punch. And that “variety” also extends to Stafford’s knack for creating personae; he’s a shapeshifter who is, by turn, a sly hayseed, an aging rockabilly fan, a very confused courter, a Louisiana oracle, and so on.

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