Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Andy Shernoff in advance of his 71st birthday Sunday.
—Ed.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but LPs? A whole different story. One glance at the cover of The Dictators’ 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!—which features roadie turned singer and “Secret Weapon” Handsome Dick Manitoba hamming it up in a wrestling outfit and a 200-watt smile, resplendent in Jewfro and dark sunglasses, an outrageous red glitter jacket bearing his name hanging from a gym locker nearby—and you know you’re in the presence of something truly outrageous and great.

Oh, how I love The Dictators. The New Yawk proto-punkers may have produced only one brilliant LP, namely Go Girl Crazy! (which sold like shit), but talk about influential; you can draw a direct line between it to The Ramones and straight to The Beastie Boys. All three bands have the same smartass “fight for your right to party” punk attitude; they all deliver tons of snotty and hilarious one-liners; and they all use great guitar riffs to deliver the goods. If The Ramones (who later did a version of “California Sun” off Go Girl Crazy!) and The Beastie Boys didn’t cop their entire shtick from The Dictators’ debut, I’m Michael Bolton, mulleted version.

But to be honest I don’t give a shit whether Go Girl Crazy! was the Sgt. Pepper of proto-punk and the Rosetta Stone for hundreds of bands that came later. All that matters to me is that Go Girl Crazy! is one of the rockingest, funniest, and most gleeful albums ever made. And it’s good-natured, too. I used the word “snotty” above, but The Dictators are a friendly lot, and as a result get away with a lot. You would expect songs like “Master Race Rock” and “Back to Africa” to be prime examples of the deliberate punk outrage, but both turn out to be just the opposite of what they appear to be, namely funny and friendly. Why, these guys don’t even swear; co-lead vocalist Andy “Adny” Shernoff says “heck!”

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Los Altos, California’s Chocolate Watch Band were not a bubblegum act—their rough edges and maniacal R&B led one critic to dub them America’s Rolling Stones—but they sure got whored out as one.

On the band’s first two studio LPs, their villainous producer Ed Cobb thought nothing of turning them into a psychedelic garage Milli Vanilli, using the band on a few songs, while either using another band altogether on other songs or replacing snot-nosed vocalist Dave Aguilar, who may well have been in another state altogether when the songs were recorded, with a ringer named Don Bennett on others.

On 1967’s No Way Out, you need a scorecard (and do some internet sleuthing) to figure out which songs actually featured the band and/or Aguilar. Things aren’t quite as difficult on the band’s 1968 sophomore LP, The Inner Mystique, but Cobb’s machinations are every bit as egregious.

On side one, the actual Chocolate Watch Band are MIA, while on two of the songs on the far superior second side, Cobb (who also produced The Standells and wrote “Dirty Water,” as well as “Tainted Love”!) swapped out Aguilar’s vocals for Bennett’s.

Why? Because he could. And it’s not like you don’t notice. Aguilar’s vocals are grease-caked, garage floor sleazy; Bennett, who would later adopt the name Prince Teddy (and record an obscure 1977 LP under that name), was an African-American whose voice is a bigger, blunter instrument. And the psychedelic pastiches on side one are largely wastes of space.

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Celebrating Lee Kerslake, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Who was it who said, “He came to mock, but remained to pray?” It doesn’t matter. But such was the case–to a degree any way–when I decided to “relisten” to Uriah Heep. I’ve always loved “Easy Livin’,” but when I was but a teenage droogie I plunked down some hard-earned money for a Uriah Heep 8-track that quickly made its way to the bottom of my 8-track pile. And I haven’t thought of them, except to chuckle at their risible swords and sorcery pretensions, since.

So imagine my surprise when I turned on 1972’s Demons and Wizards–chortle, chortle–only to discover I rather liked the thing. Sure, the lyrics are the work of somebody who has spent far too much time amongst hobbits. And David Byron’s histrionic tonsils–his voice has more octaves than there are steps on the stairway to heaven–occasionally make Geddy Lee sound like Paul Rodgers. But I’ll be damned if Demon and Wizards doesn’t have something up its sleeve–namely some good songs featuring some dandy playing. It’s not some progressive rock nightmare, it’s a rock ’n’ roll album, at least in its better moments, and Demons and Wizards has plenty of very good moments.

Demons and Wizards is fantasy-drenched right down to its head shop cover art by the infamous Roger Dean, and I expected to hate it for that reason alone. There’s nothing I despise more than your standard dungeons and dragons imagery, and Demons and Wizards has all the makings of a dungeon torture device. Things start inauspiciously enough; LP opener “The Wizard” boasts some awful lyrics featuring “a magic man” who wears “a cape of gold,” and I wanted to call it a day right then and there. Then I realized “The Wizard” might as well be a Styx song, and I have a perverse liking for Styx. There was, absurdly, hope in the air.

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Celebrating Phil Mogg on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

What do I have to do to send you home in a UFO today? Now hear me out, dear buyer here at Area 51 Motors, because I know what you’re thinking—UFO was a very good English heavy metal band that put out some very good albums back in the seventies, but nowadays they’re a big name only in places outside our solar system.

And the best of them (1977’s Lights Out) isn’t even on the lot! I sold it to a Hawkwind fan who obviously had it confused with UFO’s rather desultory foray into space rock, 1971’s UFO 2: Flying. (Hey, this UFO salesmen can’t afford to have scruples—he’s got a wife and kids!)

But here’s the thing—for a couple of years in America’s bicentennial decade UFO, thanks in large part to the fancy fretmanship of wunderkind Hun guitarist and Scorpions defector Michael Schenker, produced some tasty and surprisingly melodic heavy metal that deserved better than it got. And what we’re looking at here (feel free to give the tires a kick) is my personal favorite, 1975’s Force It. As you can tell just by looking it’s cherry. Only one previous owner, a kindly little old lady who only drove it to Black Sabbath shows on black sabbath.

If you have a bathroom plumbing fetish, the shiny stainless steel fixtures on the cover are a real turn on, and if you’re more of a traditionalist there are also a couple of the members of Throbbing Gristle going at it hot and heavy amidst all the gleaming German steel and blinding white porcelain, although the powers that be in the US MADE THEM TRANSPARENT so if you bought the album in the states you basically got shafted by puritanism. But lucky for you, the baby you’re looking at is an import!

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Celebrating Ritchie Blackmore on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

If I’ve never come forward publicly about the indelible mark I made on rock history at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1971, it’s because I’m still peeved that Deep Purple saw fit to slander me as “Some stupid with a flare gun” in their big hit single “Smoke on the Water.” Firing that flare gun into the roof of the Montreux Casino may not have been the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but STUPID? I was EXCITED, and I just happened to have a flare gun on my person, and one thing led to another and before I knew it the rattan ceiling was on fire and all manner of shrieks were freaking towards the exits.

But enough personal history and on to Deep Purple, a band that I’ve always had reservations about. I find the English heavy metal avatars ponderous, plodding, and unduly portentous, and if you don’t know what I mean I direct you to “Smoke on the Water,” which is the very un-lightweight little ditty they’ll probably best be remembered for and which I can only describe as a very stoned dinosaur stomping in slow dazed circles to the accompaniment of one gargantuan and omnipresent guitar riff.

That said, Deep Purple–who after a lot of early creative experimentation and moments of serendipitous genius finally settled upon a sound that combined elements of prog rock and the grinding blues-based hard rock that would become known as heavy metal–had their moments, and lots of them are to be found on their sixth and most commercially successful LP, 1972’s Machine Head. From its very metallic (the title’s stamped in steel!) cover to its far-out boogie numbers Machine Head is one wild ride, what with Ian Gillian’s shriek, Ritchie Blackmore’s blazing guitar, Jon Lord’s “I am two separate gorillas” organ, and the positively intimidating drumming of Sir Ian Paice, who has yet to be knighted but certainly ought to be lest he become angry and start throwing punches.

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Remembering Lowell George, born on this day in 1945. —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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Almost as beloved as their legendarily loud and crude 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum—a testament to inept genius if there ever was one—San Francisco trio Blue Cheer’s 1968 follow-up Outsideinside got its title because, at least according to legend, several of its tracks were deemed too loud to be recorded in the confines of an actual recording studio. The record company was worried the band’s proclivity for living solely in the red would melt the equipment and incinerate everybody in the place.

Only trouble is—and this really gets my goat—I’ve been unable to figure out which songs were recorded outside, at places like Gate Five in lovely Sausalito, Muir Beach in Marin County, and Pier 57 in New York City. I would love to know—if the trio (Leigh Stephens, guitar; Dickie Peterson, lead vocals and bass; and Paul Whalely, drums) managed to record their barbarically high-volume debut in a studio, just how loud could this shit have been?

And were the outdoor tracks recorded before actual audiences, or were they kept at a safe distance to prevent mass hearing loss?

Expert types will tell you Outsideinside is Blue Cheer tamed, that they’d learned how to play their instruments (well, a little) and were more interested in actual song structure, but fortunately, the experts are wrong. The first couple of songs sound a mite more civilized than anything off Blue Cheer’s debut, but it’s obvious the threesome weren’t taking lessons or anything.

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The Black Angels have exuded menace via drone, squalls of guitar feedback, and dark subject matter since they first blew me away with the War Is Hell tracks “The First Vietnamese War” and “Young Men Dead” and the doom-laden “The Sniper at the Gates of Heaven” way back in (has it really been that long?) 2006.

They swiped their name from the Velvet Underground’s “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” and it’s appropriate. Theirs is not your hippie uncle’s idea of psychedelic music.

Over the course of six full-length LPs from 2006 to 2022, The Black Angels have transmogrified dread into ecstasy, utilizing the sitar in a manner that would not get Ravi Shankar’s Seal of Spiritual Approval and in general recording music that is all Altamont and no Woodstock.

I’m talking dark, darker, darkest, and when that massive drone kicks in, you won’t relax, but you’ll float downstream, straight into the Heart of Darkness.

The Black Angels hail from Austin, Texas, and have played festival after festival with such kindred spirits as the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Japan’s Acid Mothers Temple, the Flaming Lips, Spiritualized, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Dandy Warhols—even The Zombies! And they did a several-day stint as Roky Erickson’s backing band.

The liner notes of their 2006 debut LP Passover included a quote from Edvard Munch: “Illness, insanity, and death are the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.” Very appropriate, that.

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Celebrating Aidan Moffat in advance of his birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

It’s Monday afternoon here at the Hug & Pint in lovely Falkirk, Scotland, not that you’d know it because management 86’d the sun a long time ago because it was annoying the customers, and that blootered bampot at the end of the bar is Arab Strap’s Adrian Moffat, and aren’t you curious what he’s havering on about?

Well I can tell you, because along with bandmate Malcolm Middleton he’s laid it all out for you in lovingly lugubrious detail on 2003’s Monday at the Hug & Pint. And as it turns out Moffat is one articulate, if very down in the mouth, fellow, one whose life is shite because, well, he has problems. Women problems, a rat-arsed-every-night-of-the-week problem, self-esteem problems.

And if that kind of bleak doesn’t sound like your idea of listening pleasure there’s this: Arab Strap’s music—often gloomy, yet just as often achingly lovely—makes for the perfect backdrop for Moffat’s often self-lacerating lyrics, and together they can be downright revelatory.

The only real question you’re left with after listening to Monday at the Hug & Pint—Arab Strap’s fifth studio outing and their next to last before going on a very long hiatus—is why you’ll want to play it again rather than go drown yourself in the nearest bog. Like Arab Strap’s other albums, this one is an epic bummer.

But here’s the explanation—depression can be surprisingly cathartic. It doesn’t hurt that Moffat is a lyricist of uncommon talent, and that Arab Strap seem incapable of writing of a bad song. Enter the Hug & Pint on a Monday night and you’ll wind up with more than just a bad case of sexual frustration and a wicked jackhammer of a hangover—you will partake of the divinely morose.

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

Hall & Oates: You either love them or you hate them. Or, as in my case, you love them AND you hate them. The blue-eyed Philly soul and pop superstars scored some 3,400 Billboard Top 100 hits during the late seventies and early eighties, including such unavoidable classics as “Maneater,” “Out of Touch,” and “Kiss on My List,” which played continually on every car radio and in every mall, bar, elevator, Lothario’s bedroom, police station holding cell (I heard “Rich Girl” in one once), and psychiatric facility in the land.

I loathed Hall & Oates because their largely soulless soul songs (you can’t be a machine and have a soul) were the epitome of slick studio perfection, but even more so because said songs were so monstrously catchy that even if you hated them you still found yourself singing along with pleasure every time you heard one. I experienced much self-loathing over this. Hated myself like lime spandex. But before there was Hall & Oates, the inhuman hit-making machine, there was Hall & Oates, the soft rock, soul, and folk duo who recorded three albums (Whole Oats, Abandoned Luncheonette, and War Babies) for Atlantic Records between 1972 and 1974.

None of them fared well commercially, and Hall & Oates could have ended up a footnote to history had they not been lucky enough to sign with RCA. Most casual Hall & Oates’ fans have never heard the Atlantic-era records, and that’s too bad, because 1973’s Abandoned Luncheonette in particular is a real rocking-horse winner.

What else can I say about Hall & Oates? The ever-humble Daryl Hall, who has recorded experimental LPs on the side with the likes of Robert Fripp, once said of his partnership with John Oates, “I’m 90% and he’s 10%, and that’s the way it is.” Woah. To be fair to Hall, it did seem at times that Oates’ only role was as band mustache. But that’s misleading. Oates’ vocals and guitar playing were indispensable, and he wrote some wonderful songs. As for Abandoned Luncheonette, its list of studio musicians goes on and on, and includes a guy on Howling guitar, whatever that is. I get the idea they had to bring it to the studio in a cage, and keep it on a sturdy leash at all times.

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All right, all right, all right. Before we get down to sparking a joint, please allow me to say a few words about the sequel to the greatest movie soundtrack ever made about the greatest movie ever made about the greatest year in human history—1976, America’s Bicentennial Year, and the year I graduated from high school!

I’m talking, of course, about Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused, which is the perfect time capsule and uncannily captures the reality of being young and in high school in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the mid-Seventies. And its 1993 soundtrack, which is an almost-perfect time capsule of the era. Such a perfect time capsule that it spawned a sequel, that same year’s Even More Dazed and Confused, which compiled all of the songs from the motion picture not included on the first soundtrack.

First, a few reservations. It took years for me to figure out why neither soundtrack included anything by Led Zeppelin, which is unfortunate because one of the film’s high-water marks occurs when King of the Stoners, Slater, waxes rhapsodic about a one-hour Bonzo drum solo (“You couldn’t handle that shit on strong acid”). But I finally found out it wasn’t Linklater’s fault. He wanted to include “Rock and Roll,” but Robert Plant (the prick) nixed the deal. Linklater never forgave him.

Likewise, with Aerosmith, which is near tragic because the film ends with Pink, Slater, Simone, and Wooderson driving to Houston to buy tickets to see the band. Again, not Linklater’s fault. He tried but failed to include “Sweet Emotion” because of exorbitant licensing costs.

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

Part of what makes The Band so fascinating is they served two very different roles in rock history—first as the backing band that produced a hurricane of sound behind Bob Dylan during his epochal (and polarizing) 1966 tour, then as the purveyors of a totally original fusion of country, rock, R&B, folk, and soul music that would ultimately be labeled “Americana.” A unique designation given that The Band’s members—with the exception of drummer/ vocalist/ and mandolin player Levon Helm, an Arkansas boy—all hailed from Canada.

And Robbie Robertson—who passed away on August 9, 2023—was their leader, a role he assumed both because he became the band’s chief (and in time almost sole) songwriter and had the energy and organizational skills a laid-back Helm (the group’s original leader) constitutionally lacked. Robertson, a young Toronto guitar whiz of Native American/Canadian descent—Dylan once called him “the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness”—was every bit as contradictory a figure as The Band itself.

He was a Canadian who created American myths, and wrote songs so tightly wound they left little room for him to show off his guitar chops. And he became a case study in the fickle nature of musical genius—after writing the immortal songs on The Band’s first two albums—1968’s seminal Music from Big Pink and 1969’s The Band—his creative wellspring slowed to a trickle; The Band’s subsequent studio albums became increasingly spotty affairs as Robertson went from writing great story songs to stilted and didactic lectures on the loss of the America of his imagining. There are great songs on the later albums, but there are far more forgettable ones.

The Band was a powerful musical outfit—its players were uniformly crack musicians who’d honed their skills touring with Arkansas rockabilly and country legend Ronnie Hawkins, who’d decided he’d sooner be a big fish in Toronto and points north than a small fry in his native America. And they boasted three incredible vocalists in piano player and sometimes drummer Richard Manuel, drummer and mandolin player Levon Helm, and bass player Rick Danko.

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Who is Neil Merryweather, and how come I’ve never heard of him? Well, turns out he’s a Toronto bassist/vocalist/songwriter who started out playing the blues before putting out (with his band Space Rangers) a positively wonderful late-era, capital “G” Glam album in 1975’s Kryptonite.

I’ve never read about Merryweather in any of the many books about Glam Rock I’ve read, which boggles the mind. As does his backstory: he went from the Mynah Birds (who also spawned Rick James and some guy named Neil Young), played in a whole bunch of bands you’ve probably never heard of, was asked by Stephen Stills to play bass for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (and turned him down), recorded a 1969 album (Word of Mouth) featuring the likes of Steve Miller, Dave Mason, and Charlie Musselwhite, and then meandered around (he briefly fronted a band called Mama Lion) before finally forming another band called Space Rangers, which recorded two great albums in 1974’s Space Rangers (which included spacy covers of “Eight Miles High” and “Sunshine Superman”) and the superior Kryptonite. Before disappearing for forty-odd years!

Space Rangers were Neil Merryweather, bass and vocals; Michael “Jeep” Willis, lead guitar; James Herndon, Chamberlin, synthesizer, guitar, and slide guitar; and Tim McGovern, drums and guitar. The Chamberlin (which was news to me) is an electro-mechanical keyboard instrument and precursor to the Mellotron, and Merryweather bought his from Sonny and Cher! It had a piano-style keyboard and used prerecorded tapes featuring various musical instruments or special effects. It, along with the synthesizer, helped Merryweather make the transition from blues/hard rock musician to Space Glammer.

Krytonite is a remarkably solid album—Glam with a hard edge, and consistently up-tempo. I was so excited by “The Groove,” a T-Rex-school Glam opus, that I immediately sent it to my pal Steve Mitchell, Glam lover and the Svengali behind UK “theft band” The Pooh Sticks, to see what he thought.

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Celebrating Jim “Dandy” Mangrum on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim “Dandy” Mangrum is the Ryne Duren of rock. Duren was the journeyman pitcher who could throw the ball like 167 mph. His only problem? He was legally blind. Not even Coke-bottle-thick glasses helped. From 1954-65 batters suffered nervous breakdowns at his appearance, because as famed Yankee manager Casey Stengel noted, “If he hit you in the head you might be in the past tense.” It didn’t improve batters’ nerves that Duren’s first pitch generally zoomed 20 feet over the catcher’s head. You never knew if Duren was going to hit the strike zone, the third base coach, or some poor kid in the bleacher seats.

Jim Dandy’s voice, same deal. I’d call it a wild pitch, but Mangrum has no pitch, and no control of his amazing instrument whatsoever. He might hit a note, or he might hit some stoned head in the 43rd row. But that’s what I like about Black Oak Arkansas; it managed to become one of the premier live acts of the seventies with a tone-deaf singer with mighty pipes, while playing a lascivious acid-fried hillbilly boogie you have to hear to believe.

Unlike its Southern Rock brethren, BOA was a band of bona fide freaks, LSD-soaked long-hair rednecks who lived off the land commune style (to avoid a felony warrant, basically) in the hills of rural north-central Arkansas. Black Oak played a whoop-ass psycho-boogie that might include Mangrum soloing on the washboard and drummer Tommy Aldridge playing the drums with his hands on such cosmic cornpone as “Mutants of the Monster” or “Lord Have Mercy on My Soul,” with its monologue by Jim “Aldous Huxley in bib overalls” Dandy about the Halls of Karma and how we can all be as one if we only do enough bong hits, like the one the boys do at the beginning of unreleased 1972 studio cut “UP, UP, UP.”

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I was going to open this review of West Texas hard rock band Bloodrock by saying something withering, like they weren’t even fit to open for Grand Funk Railroad. Then I discovered Bloodrock did indeed open for Grand Funk Railroad in 1970.

Although the more I think about it, the more I think opening for Grand Funk Railroad makes Bloodrock even worse than I thought.

1970’s Bloodrock 2 was the band’s only taste of success, thanks in large part to “D.O.A.,” a plane crash song inspired by guitarist Lee Pickens’ brush with an actual plane crash. “When I was 17, I wanted to be an airline pilot,” said Pickens. “I had just gotten out of this airplane with a friend of mine, at this little airport, and I watched him take off. He went about 200 feet in the air, rolled and crashed.”

I’m assuming Pickens saw this and decided that remaining earthbound as a rock and roll guitarist was a safer career path.

I’ll get to “D.O.A.” later—the first thing I want to say is that Bloodrock, who I really wanted to like because I’m the world’s foremost expert on and biggest fan of plane crash songs, are an unfortunately mediocre proposition. Bloodrock 2 has its moments, but there’s no ignoring its host of flaws, the most impossible to ignore being that it has too many weak songs, and the songs that have a modicum of punch are saddled with lyrics so funny bad they’re worth quoting at length.

In short, Bloodrock 2 is a plane crash of an album, and the amazing thing is that it not only charted but stayed on the charts for several months.

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