Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Unlike a certain religious figure I can think of, Rod “the Mod” Stewart didn’t walk on water until his third go-round. On 1971’s Every Picture Tells a Story Stewart finally got it right. He nailed down his persona (lovable rogue with lascivious cackle and sensitive side). Wrote himself a remarkable assemblage of brilliant songs (including perhaps the two best coming-of-age songs ever written and the heartfelt “Mandolin Wind”). And finally assembled THE IDEAL cast of players who found the perfect balance between rough and tumble rock ’n’ roll, folk, and soul. If Every Picture Tells a Story isn’t the perfect album, I’m D.B. Cooper.

Which isn’t to say he sank beneath the waters without a trace his first two times out. Anything but. Both 1969’s The Rod Stewart Album (which was released under the better title An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down in the UK) and 1970’s Gasoline Alley are superb albums—gritty, soulful powerhouses packed with strong Stewart originals and imaginative covers, and boasting simpatico supporting musicians many of whom would join him on Every Picture Tells a Story.

His first two don’t get the attention afforded solo album number three, but they’re required listening. Unlike Elton John and David Bowie, Stewart (who’d honed his vocal chops with Long John Baldry’s Steampacket, the little known and short-lived Shotgun Express and the Jeff Beck Group) never took a false or indecisive step. He had his blueprint down from the very beginning—it was simply a matter of perfecting his songwriting.

And talk about double-tasking. Stewart may have the reputation as a debonair roué and two-fisted drinker (who else would put out a greatest hits album shaped like a whiskey glass?), but at least part of it must have been smoke and mirrors—he couldn’t have spent all of his time bedding the ladies and hitting the bottle, because if so where’d he find the time to put together his early solo albums (one per year, more or less) while also singing and writing songs (and immortal ones, at that) for Faces, who toured heavily and released four albums in three years in their own right? The guy worked like a bricklayer. And the lads in Faces were doing double-duty too—some or all of them appeared on his solo albums, that is until he began his sad downward slide towards mainstream mediocrity and decided he could be more mediocre without them.

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Remembering Paul Barrere in advance of his birthdate tomorrow.
—Ed.

Little Feat was one of America’s foremost pre-punk-era bands, perhaps even its best. Little Feat boasted musicians with mad skills, the best of them the brilliant vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Lowell George. And like a great junkball pitcher, they could throw all manner of bedazzling shit your way. They played fastball rock, curveball boogie, knuckleball blues, and a dangerous forkball funk, and with a runner of third and one out they might even send some screwball country past you, and make you look like a fool, boy. No wonder none other than Jimmy Page hailed them as his favorite American band.

In short, Little Feat cooked. But lots of bands can cook—all you need is a frying pan and some grease. What truly separated Little Feat from the pack was its brilliant songwriting. The band bequeathed us a whole shitload of timeless songs—including “Easy to Slip,” “Willin’,” “Spanish Moon,” “Hamburger Midnight,” “Dixie Chicken,” and plenty more besides—not one of which I have ever heard played on my car radio. There is no justice in this world, boyo.

In addition to being a great band, Little Feat remains an enduring medical enigma. To wit: When did Little Feat, or Patient X as the band is referred to in the copious medical literature on the subject, actually die? Some would argue that Little Feat is very much alive, and it’s true that a band by that name continues to make the rounds of the concert circuit. But I would argue that said band is little more than an animated corpse, dragging its desiccated carcass and reek of putrefaction from town to town and playing by means of jolts of electricity carefully administered by technicians hiding backstage.

Still others would pronounce the time of death as June 1979, when George died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Arlington, Virginia at age 34. But in my expert medical opinion, and I will go into this in more detail later, Little Feat expired well before that, in 1975 to be precise, a victim of Lowell’s diminishing role in the band and a creeping case of Steely Dan Disease.

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Remembering Delaney Bramlett, born on this day in 1939. —Ed.

Poor Eric Clapton. Having been through the supergroup wringer with Cream and Blind Faith, there was nothing he craved more than a little anonymity. No more “Clapton is God”; all he wanted to be was a player in a band that wasn’t being hyped to the stars, and where he could perform his six-string pyrotechnics in the background, as it were. Those are rich man problems, for sure, but Clapton was truly burnt out, and given the opportunity to tour with the American soul/rock/blues band Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, he happily said yes. It was a respite and it paid off, as his guitar playing on the resulting LP, 1970’s On Tour with Eric Clapton, testified.

During the early seventies the Bramletts fronted a musical family that saw them taking in lots of famous orphans, including Duane Allman, George Harrison, Rita Coolidge, Dave Mason, and King Curtis. Despite a host of studio LPs Delaney and Bonnie were best regarded as an incendiary live act, one that led Clapton to not only say, “Delaney taught me everything I know about singing,” but “For me, going on [with Blind Faith] after Delaney and Bonnie was really, really tough, because I thought they were miles better than us.” In any event his time spent with Delaney and Bonnie was a happy one for the troubled musician.

On Tour with Eric Clapton didn’t just feature Clapton. In fact it was populated by a veritable who’s who of the best of rock’s supporting musicians, many of whom also played on that same year’s LP Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Clapton’s next project, Derek and the Dominos. You’ve got Dave Mason on guitar, Bobby Whitlock on organ and keyboards, Carl Radle on bass, Jim Gordon on drums, Bobby Keys on saxophone, Jim Price on trombone and trumpet, and Rita Coolidge on backing vocals; the folks who saw this iteration of the band live were lucky indeed.

Opener “Things Get Better” is a Booker T. and the M.G.’s song, and the band does Stax Records proud with a great horn section, Delaney and Bonnie’s soulful singing, and lots of funky organ by Bobby Whitlock. Things really do get better when Rita Coolidge throws in on vocals and Clapton rips into a guitar solo that never fails to sock my knocks off.

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Before we get down to the nitty gritty on why the late Junior Kimbrough is one of the few blues musicians I can listen to, take a gander at that album cover. It tells you everything you need to know about the Mississippi hill country blues guitar legend.

What it tells you is what we have here is a man who cares deeply about his personal appearance. Who knows how to dress for success. Style is everything to this guy. He’s a dude. Okay, what it actually tells you is that here is a guy who doesn’t give a shit. Why, he can’t even be bothered to put on a shirt, and Robert Plant he ain’t. (On 1992’s All Night Long, he is wearing a shirt, but it’s a godawful pink dress shirt he probably paid two bucks for at Goodwill.) Who slaps a picture like that on their own album cover? What’s he trying to tell us? I’m the type of guy whose idea of a good time is going to the town dump to drink beer and shoot rats?

And I like that about Junior Kimbrough. It speaks to a complete indifference to commercial considerations, and to a lack of personal ambition that extended to his actual recording career. Kimbrough first walked into a recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee in 1966 to record for Goldwax Records. He was in his mid-thirties—hardly a young man in a hurry to make his mark. The album he recorded there collected dust until 2009. The head of Goldwax Records (the wonderfully named Quinton Claunch) thought Kimbrough sounded too country.

Kimbrough didn’t seem to much care. What he did care about was playing live (often at house parties) and operating juke joints. And fathering children—he had thirty-six in total, ten more than he’d need to start his own professional baseball team! As a result he released only a small handful of songs until 1992, when he released All Night Long—some twenty-six years after those first sessions in Memphis. He recorded it at Junior’s Place, a juke joint he operated outside Holly Springs, Mississippi, some nine miles from the town where he’d been born and less than forty miles from the stomping grounds of R.L. Burnside, one of the few other blues musicians I can stomach. Junior Kimbrough was not a rambling man.

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Celebrating Dave Knights on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

Oh groovy of groovies! Procol Harum MADE the Summer of Love with their immortal debut single “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” If I recall correctly John Lennon used to pump it out the windows of his psychedelic Rolls Royce while driving stoned immaculate down happening Carnaby Street, and why not? The sound is heavy as Bach, the lyrics are, like, deep, man, and listening to it is like slow dancing your way across the bottoms of tangerine seas while the sun of the real world beats on the waves above you a million, trillion miles away.

John Lennon again: “You play it when you take some acid and wooooo.”

A couple of months later Procol Harum gave us their debut LP (and one of the finest albums of 1967), Procol Harum. Released by my favorite label, Regal Zonophone, Procol Harum is every bit as groovy as “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which didn’t make it onto the U.K. release but was included on the U.S. one. Procol Harum can be divided into heavy tunes and pop lightweights but it doesn’t have a loser on it unless you include the silly “Good Captain Clack,” which the folks at Regal Zonophone had the good sense to jettison from the U.S. version in favor of “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

People talk about Procol Harum being a slice of proto-prog and I suppose they’re right; organist Matthew Fisher liked his dead composers every bit as much as Keith Emerson. But–but!–he never lowered himself to slavish imitation but instead alchemized the sounds of all those defunct powdered wig-wearing geniuses in such a way that you never feel like you’re being forced to inhale some moribund Beethoven’s classical gas.

Take “Repent Walpurgis.” It may have been built on the moldering corpses of Charles-Marie Widor and Johann Sebastian Bach but what I hear is one cool instrumental; sure, Fisher waxes classical on the organ, but he’s playing it with soul, and soul is what differentiates this baby from your typical ELP Mussorgsky plod. The proof? His organ sounds right at home with Robin “Bridge of Sighs” Trower’s truly astounding guitar caterwaul. Fisher’s more playful, too; his organ on the jaunty “She Wandered Through the Garden Fence” may fall under the label “neoclassical,” but it’s also a lot of fun.

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NYC indie pop band Vampire Weekend came off the starting block like Nosferatu after drinking the blood of the entire Romanian Olympic track team. Got their collegiate mugs on the cover of Spin before their debut album hit the record stores! The buzz was enormous! Everyone loved them! Music critics! Normal people! Werewolves even! And 2008’s Vampire Weekend exceeded expectations. The world swooned!

Well I didn’t. What I hear when I listen to Vampire Weekend is the Paul Simon World Music Academy Glee Club. They culturally appropriated the same nifty Afropop Art Garfunkel’s old singing partner so deftly Simonized, tossed in just enough strings to get the label “chamber pop” slapped on ‘em, and put the whole mess to work in some undeniably catchy but lighter than lightweight pop songs that are not devoid of charm. Called their sound “Upper West Side Soweto.”

But they don’t fool me! They’re The Killers with better academic bona fides (they attended Columbia!), a more eclectic record collection, and a lead singer who reminds me of Sting after undergoing angst reduction surgery. Slight is the word I would use to describe them. And dull. They’re energy vampires whose music I can’t get away from fast enough—pure Transylvanian tedium. Their music is the antithesis of sanguine. It’s defanged. They don’t drink blood, they drink milk—the 2% stuff probably.

Of course there was pushback—there always is. Some wag dubbed them “the whitest band in the world,” to which the band responded by noting there wasn’t a single WASP in the band. Which is fair enough. But I don’t see any Fela Kuti lookalikes in their press glossies either. I think what said snide commentator was getting at is they’ve bleached all of the black out of their Afrobeat, just as The Police did with reggae, only Vampire Weekend used more bleach.

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Remembering Harold Melvin, born on this day in 1939. —Ed.

When it comes to the bands representing the “Philadelphia Sound” that came to dominate the soul charts in the early seventies, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes were inarguably the best.

Signed to Gamble & Huff’s Philadelphia International label in 1972 and featuring the mind-blowing baritone of lead singer and soul legend Teddy Pendergrass, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes recorded masterful soul, R&B, and disco tunes that were alternately inspirational and heartrending, thanks chiefly to the band’s myriad musical talents, the stellar production of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and the almost phantasmagorically powerful pipes of Pendergrass, who at his most passionate could both cause people of the female persuasion to swoon and blow the wooly off a mammoth.

I picked Collectors’ Item: All Their Greatest Hits! for two simple reasons; (1) it really does cull the biggest hits from the band’s golden years of 1972-1975 with Philadelphia International, before Pendergrass defected to pursue a solo career, and (2) it has one of the cheesiest album covers I’ve ever seen, a horror of pastels with the band in blue leisure suits (with Harold in lime green!) huddled together as if for protection against the dubious painting skills of one Victor Juhasz. I have half a mind to buy the album and frame it on my wall next to a black light painting of a unicorn.

Melvin & The Blue Notes were a vocal group, and the music on their songs was provided by the legendary MFSB, a stable of more than 30 musicians based at Philly’s Sigma Sound Studios who also worked with the Spinners, Wilson Pickett, the Stylistics, the O’Jays, and others. They’re chiefly remembered for their great proto-disco track “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” which was to become the theme song for Don Cornelius’ Soul Train. How cool, I ask you, is that?

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If the folk music of John Jacob Niles is so unlistenable, how come I can’t stop listening to it? I should add that I’ve never heard anyone say his music is unlistenable—I’m saying it.

Niles sings in an eerie falsetto that makes me think of a wraith come from some dark and haunted holler to collect my soul and take it no place good. He brings to mind a patient in a 1930s state-run insane asylum, his voice echoing down the dim corridors long after lights out, and you KNOW with a shiver this guy is never getting out and you’re never getting out either. I can watch a horror movie and go straight to bed. Niles I won’t listen to after ten o’clock in the morning. I don’t want to hear that voice in my sleep.

Niles is acknowledged as a major influence on the folk music of the fifties and sixties. Dylan dug him. Me, I listen to him accompany himself on his homemade dulcimer and I want to hide. You’d never guess (or I never would have) that Niles, who was born in Louisville, Kentucky on April 28, 1892—the same day the Dalton Gang bit the dust in Coffeyville, Kansas—was trained in the Schola Cantorum de Paris and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, transcribed Appalachian folk music from oral sources when he wasn’t writing his own folk songs, and published classical compositions for choir and art songs for voice and piano. He wasn’t some squint-eyed, half-deranged inbred from Yoknapatawpha County, come to Gerdes Folk City to be born. He had no Faulkner yokel in him. He was a civilized and worldly man.

Needless to say he wasn’t one of your commercial folk singers like Harry Belafonte or the Weavers. Nor was he a populist guitar slinger like Woody Guthrie or cowboy troubadour like Cisco Houston or bellows-voiced force of nature along the lines of Odetta or Lead Belly. John Jacob Niles was never going to win a wide audience. What surprises me most about John Jacob Niles is he HAD an audience, and presumably still does. You watch yellowing film footage of the man and what you see is this white-haired old gaunt who looks like a small-town pharmacist strumming on a dulcimer and when he lifts his head and opens his mouth wide (too wide, it ain’t natural) you expect him to bray like a donkey.

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Celebrating Ray Davies on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

Ah, the Kinks. Of all the great bands to come out of England in the 1960s, they were by far the most English. Their music hall inclinations and deadpan irony simply didn’t translate, and until they reconstituted themselves as a hard-rocking touring band in the 1970s their only claims to fame here in the U.S.A. were “You Really Got Me” and “Lola.” Ray Davies was simply too smart, and had his tongue too far in his cheek, to win over U.S. fans, although I do remember—because it was, I think, the first 45 rpm record I ever heard—my older brother’s copy of “Apeman.” Nor did it help that the band was refused permits by the American Federation of Musicians to tour the U.S. for 4 years, ostensibly due to over-the-top on-stage band mate on band mate violence.

Of course, the Kinks always had their Kultists, people who lovingly cuddled their copies of 1968’s The Village Green Preservation Society the way you might your dog Blighter. As for the rest of us, we listened to our Beatles and our Stones and The Who, and the rest of England be damned. This was especially true if you were raised, the way I was, in a rural outpost of provincialism, where the Klan once marched through town and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was considered the pinnacle of pop sophistication.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I was a real latecomer to Ray Davies and Company, but have come to love their music, including Muswell Hillbillies. It’s one of the bleakest and funniest albums I know, and it deals with a subject that I hold near and dear to my heart—namely, the failure of everything. Tormented character follows tormented character on this LP, and I can’t get enough of it. Davies sings about paranoia, rampant alcoholism, and the myriad other complications of life, all from a working class perspective. Only Randy Newman could compete with Davies in the hilarious downer department, and while I prefer Newman, Davies more than holds his own.

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It would be easy as invading Poland to say that Trio is what rock ’n’ roll would have sounded like had Nazi Germany won World War II. But it would be a Goebbels-sized lie—rock ’n’ roll would have sounded like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The Fuhrer would have used their music to warm up the faithful before speaking at the Nuremberg Rallies (“Welcome back my friends to the show that lasts a thousand years…). They would have been groovy totalitarian chic.

Trio, on the other hand, were such an amiable bunch they used the term “Neue Deutsche Fröhlichkeit” (or “New German Cheerfulness”) to describe their music. Which isn’t to say the Hitler-loving hotties in the Bund Deutscher Mädel wouldn’t have loved them. As Jim Morrison once said, “the little girls understand.”

Trio came out of happening Großenkneten in 1979 and played a spartan form of danceable pop/hard rock. Minimalist stuff, but irresistibly catchy—funny too. And they weren’t playing Krautrock—no motorik beat, no indefinable jazzy song structures, no Damo Suzuki. Just boom boom boom with childishly simple melodies and deadpan vocals gratis Stephan Remmler (who also played the dinky keyboards) backed by Kralle Krawinkel on guitar and Peter Behrens on drums. People like to slap absurd labels on them. New Wave? Balderdash. Where are the skinny ties? Synth-pop? One dinky keyboard makes them a synth-pop band? As if! And where are the funny haircuts? Trio were rockers and proved it with “Ich Lieb Den Rock ‘N’ Roll.”

There’s not a lot of product out there but their 1983 North American release Trio and Error is the one you want. It was released elsewhere as Bye Bye but that one has a different track listing and isn’t as good. And forget about 2000’s Trilogie–The Best of Trio. How can it be a best of if it doesn’t include some of their best songs? And is padded with execrable filler? Believe me you don’t want to hear “Energi”—it sounds like Abba on bad acid gone reggae (although that actually sounds interesting!). And “Ready for You” almost makes me question their brilliance. That said, their eponymous 1981 debut is well worth a listen—”Ja Ja Ja” is pure punk genius!

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Remembering James Chance. —Ed.

Of all of the bands that came out of New York City’s No Wave music scene, my faves have always been James Chance (aka James White) and the Contortions. The Contortions combined the atonal jazz skronk of Chance’s blurting and squealing alto saxophone with broken-glass-sharp shards of guitar, played atop one very funky bottom. I preferred Chance because you could actually dance to his music, agitated as it was, because in his own special way he never abandoned that James Brown groove—he just tortured it a bit.

How Chance’s sax stands up to that of “serious” jazz players is open to debate; while he briefly studied under the great David Murray, I think of Chance as an outlier, what with his brief tenure in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Brown screams, nihilistic world view, and frequently antagonistic interactions with the very people who paid money to see him play live. These very “punk” attributes certainly separated him from the likes of his free jazz contemporaries, whose style he incorporated into his own playing. But the bottom line, when it comes to comparisons between Chance and the many other purveyors of free jazz is this: Can the guy actually play his horn, of is he just one very ballsy but amateurish poseur?

I asked my brother Jeffrey, a world-renowned free jazz expert, and this is what he said: “Regarding James Chance, I’m not quite sure where to rank him. Sonically, his alto falls neatly in the Luther Thomas/Noah Howard/Albert Ayler range. Chops-wise, I don’t think there’s a big enough pool of recorded material, especially material where he really stretches out, to see how good he really is, or could have been. That said, I think he’s ridiculously interesting, and captivating, as a soloist. What may have started as a joke, or a goof, very well could have morphed into something far greater.

John Lurie, who began in much the same vein, over time developed into an incredibly articulate player/composer. He outgrew the caricature he first presented himself as to become, in the end, a fine altoist whose sound fit hand in glove with his compositional skills. If James Chance ever played/recorded with some of the more jazz-oriented No Wave players, I think he could have done much the same thing. Imagine him sitting in with the Free Lancing-era James Blood Ulmer trio; that could have been the crucible. As it stands, however, you treat him as a joke at your own disservice.”

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PHILADELPHIA, PA | Seeing Swansea Sound at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia on Sunday, June 9 was like the British Invasion all over again. True, one band hardly constitutes an invasion, but when you consider that Swansea Sound’s members are veterans of a veritable Who’s Who of glorious bands from that nation’s storied twee (and not so twee) indie pop past, it was like having an entire British Invasion on one stage at the same time. Heavenly! The Pooh Sticks! Talulah Gosh! The Dentists! Herman’s Hermits! Hey, how did they get in there?

Small wonder the crowd was giddy (I know I was). But it wouldn’t have mattered as much if Swansea Sound was simply attempting to recapture the past, an animate jukebox playing their previous bands’ greatest hits. No, they’re a fabulous new contender in the Great British Pop Sweepstakes, and garnering critical huzzahs galore for their two full-length LPs and an assortment of singles, all of which are catchy, whiplash smart, and guaranteed to light up the hedonic hotspots in your brain until it resembles a high-end pachinko machine. You’re familiar with the Talking Heads’ “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town”? Well it was like that, without that annoying David Byrne fellow!

There were no screaming 13-year-old girls in the crowd at Johnny Brenda’s in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philly that Sunday night, but if there were any justice in the world (and this was 1964) Swansea Sound’s next stop would have been The Ed Sullivan Show. People were beaming! No one was crying! The British had arrived to save us from Vampire Weekend! But the night wasn’t an all-Brit affair; Swansea Sound were making the rounds with Jeanines, a wonderful three-piece pop group every bit as Brooklyn as a Sunday afternoon Dodgers double-header at Ebbets Field in 1954.

So yes, there were a lot of thrilled people in that club. Why, even the mope in the “Johnny Fuckin Marr” t-shirt, who seemed to be pretending he was holding up the bar in CBGB circa 1977 after being turned down by the Ramones because his haircut failed the audition, was excited, although he was doing his faux Lower East Side best to hide the fact. But he finally surrendered when Jeanines took the stage and delivered on a thrilling set of short, sharp, and melodic pop punk songs with the occasional twee edge, which is hardly surprising given they cite Marine Research and the Pastels as influences.

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Celebrating Barry Manilow on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

Back in the mid- to late seventies, when America was flying high thanks to the exalted stewardship of such Churchillian figures as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, one all-around entertainer bestrode the Pop World like a colossus. Men wanted him. Women wanted to be him. He floated like a god in a bubble of fame so high above the rest of us it would have taken Ted Nugent with a surface-to-air missile to bring him down to earth, and he was known to one and all as: Barry!

Seriously, friends and neighbors, who better personified the soft-rock seventies–that epoch of saccharine supremacy–than Barry Alan Pincus, aka Barry Manilow? He was stardust, he was golden. To listen to his songs was to drink from life’s enchanted cup. To see him live was the musical equivalent of pissing on an electric fence. His voice was glorious treacle. It was said that the mere sight of his perfect feathered hair could cure cancer. His sleepy bedroom eyes were known to enchant your larger farm animals, giving them the ability to speak in the voices of men–a skill he liked to show off in his live performances.

Barry WROTE the songs that defined an epoch. Okay, so he wrote hardly none of them, including “I Write the Songs,” which was penned by the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston. But so what? Jesus’s best material was penned by other people, including Brewer & Shipley, ZZ Top, The Byrds and Ministry, and He never catches any shit for it. Fact is Barry MADE those songs his own by sheer force of his iron will; he was the divine conduit through which flowed such immortal tunes as “Mandy,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” and “Copacabana (At the Copa).”

Manilow began his career as a folk singer, entertaining beatniks in such flea-ridden New York City coffeehouses as Gerde’s Folk City, the Cafe Wha? and the Greenwich Village Starbucks at the corner of Waverly Street and 5th Avenue. Said fellow folk musician Arnie Van Gleb, “They didn’t actually allow music in Starbucks, so he would sneak into the bathroom and play there. At least until they broke down the door and threw him out.”

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Celebrating David Thomas on his 71st birthday. —Ed.

1896 saw the premier of literary bomb-thrower Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, with its anti-hero Pere Ubu. The play promptly caused a riot, and Jarry—who once said “One can show one’s contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one’s life a poem of incoherence and absurdity” was undoubtably pleased. His goal—to the extent that he had one—was to see the hidebound and the conventional art of his time dead and buried. “Art,” he said, “is a stuffed crocodile.”

No one has ever accused Cleveland’s Pere Ubu of being a stuffed crocodile. The band that would make a virtue of clang and clamor rocketed from the tomb of the Mistake on the Lake’s Rocket from the Tombs, a promising band that collapsed over the usual creative differences.

Tombs’ members split into factions—David “Crocus Behemoth” Thomas and a collection of new players here, Stiv Bator and Company’s Dead Boys (originally Frankenstein) over there. (A third band, Friction, which was fronted by Rocket linchpin Peter Laughner, would collapse without recording an album after he rocketed his way into his own tomb at the ripe old age of 24, the result of booze and drugs.) Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys couldn’t have been more different. The latter band fit comfortably into the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids mold; Pere Ubu followed their namesake straight into the revolutionary absurd.

Thomas’ notion was to create a clamorous and fractured sound, and to do so he enlisted an initially reluctant Alan Ravenstine, whose synthesizers, atonal saxophone, and innovative tape manipulation techniques spelled the difference between Pere Ubu and its contemporaries. The result was the band’s 1978 debut The Modern Dance—arguably the most innovative LP to emerge from the post-punk era.

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Celebrating Jim Lea in advance of his 75th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

You can forget all about Kiss Alive! because Slade’s Slade Alive! is the real thing–a gut-bucket blast of pure rock ‘n’ roll energy from the poorest spellers in the history of music. This 1972 studio live affair captures this band of Wolverhampton rowdies at their rawest, and the spirit of raucous fun is contagious.

This baby was released before Slade reached full maturity and here’s how you can tell–there isn’t a single spelling error on it. And here’s another way you can tell–four of its seven cuts are covers, and the other three you probably don’t know.

The foursome’s subsequent release, 1972’s Slayed?, cemented the band’s reputation as Top of the Pops hit makers, but on Slade Alive! they established their bona fides as a formidable live act–one that pitted musical brutalism against vocalist Noddy Holder’s formidable tonsils and crowd-rousing charisma.

Slade gets filed under “Glam,” but theirs was an awkward fit. They looked ridiculous in their glitter clobber–like a bunch of roofers playing dress up–and unlike most of their Glam contemporaries appealed directly to England’s working stiffs.

Their proto-Oi! placed pints above androgyny, and their audiences did the same. When Noddy Holder says, “All the drunken louts can shout anything they like” he’s talking to the entire crowd, and not just a couple of unruly yobs.

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