Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating John Kay on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

Steppenwolf’s most excellent eponymous 1968 LP is one helluva debut. If it were a waif, I would take it in, buy it lots of cool video games, and send it to Yale. Hopefully it would provide for me in my old age.

Even your pet goldfish knows Steppenwolf derived its name from Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel of the same name. But your goldfish is wrong. In an exclusive 2018 interview with yours truly, Steppenwolf lead singer John Kay confessed he actually took the name from CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer. Said Kay, “Wolf lived next door and I can tell you with absolute certainty he’s a werewolf. On full moons he used to chase rabbits across my backyard on all fours, howling. The next night he’d be back on CNN, looking his normal self. But if you looked closely, you could see flecks of blood in his hair.”

Steppenwolf’s origins can be traced to the Toronto band the Sparrows. In 1967 by Kay and two other members of the Sparrows relocated to Los Angeles, changed their name, and recruited two additional members, one of whom would later be handed his walking papers after–wait for it–his girlfriend convinced him to avoid LA because it was going to be leveled by an earthquake and fall into the sea. Hasn’t happened yet, but better safe than sorry.

Steppenwolf and Kay–who is legally blind, but not probing stick, seeing-eye dog, Jose Feliciano blind–came out of the starting gate running. Steppenwolf spawned two immortal songs, the best known of which has become the official anthem of outlaw motorcycle gang everywhere. The LP’s other songs aren’t as well known, but they all kick ass and take surnames.

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So once upon the time there was this band of kick-out-the-jams, honest-to-god revolutionaries (or so they claimed—they seemed far more interested in becoming big rock stars than actually bringing down the fascist American state) who came out of Detroit and played this raucous brand of “high-energy” rock and roll.

And while they never sold many records (lotsa hype didn’t stop them from just fading away), over the years they’ve become these larger-than-a-Buick Motor City legends like The Stooges. Except The Stooges never trucked in revolution, probably because they were smart enough to understand that punks don’t fight revolutions (people with guns do). Which is to say Iggy and the boys were actually paying attention in class when the Rolling Stones put out “Street Fighting Man.”

The band of course was the MC5, and every hip individual loves them, if only because if you DON’T love them you risk becoming an unhip individual and NOBODY wants that. Why, they could take away your membership card. Well I’ve never loved them; I’ve never been able to understand what all the fuss is about. Sure they looked great and had real street cred being the musical arm of the White Panther Party and all, but I’d be lying if I said there’s a single MC5 song I’d expend the energy necessary to remove the album it’s on from its sleeve and put it on the stereo. Which basically puts them lower on my musical totem pole than the very unhip likes of REO Speedwagon, Styx, Journey, Sammy Johns, and the lamentable Grand Funk Railroad even.

Then again, who cares if I like a band or not? Nobody, that’s who. If you’ve gotten this far and read the above you no doubt think I’m simply a crank who’s full of shit, so please allow me to explain WHY I think the MC5, who were an undeniably good (but not great) band and an essential entry in any good book about rock history, do nothing for me. And as good a place as any to state my case is their second album (but first studio album), 1970’s Back in the USA.

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Celebrating Justin Sullivan, born on this day in 1956. —Ed.

You’ve got to love New Model Army. They were once introduced on Brit TV program The Tube as “the ugliest band in rock and roll,” their lead singer went by the name Slade the Leveller for years to avoid losing his unemployment benefits, and the United States refused them entry to the country on the grounds that their music was “of no artistic merit.” I love that last part. Oh, and the angry young leftists of New Model Army—they snatched their name from Thomas Fairfax’s English Revolution militia of the mid-1600s—were forced to abandon playing the song “Vengeance” on The Tube, due to its friendly lines, “I believe in justice/I believe in vengeance/I believe in getting the bastards.”

The band has switched genres the way some people switch their bedroom lights on and off, but one thing has remained the same—New Model Army are angry punters with a knack for controversy, as is demonstrated by the fact that 1993’s Love of Hopeless Causes came complete with directions on how to construct a nuclear device. 1991’s Thunder and Consolation is considered their high point—even Justin Sullivan, aka Slade the Leveller, has modestly called it “brilliant”—although I consider 1990’s The Ghost of Cain excellent as well, what with its great songs “The 51st State” and “Poison Street.”

I generally believe that rock and politics make unfortunate bedfellows, but I like New Model Army because as the album title Love of Hopeless Causes indicates, they know that in life there are winners and losers, and they understand what class they belong to. Which is not to say they’re taking their loser status lying down; they’re not. But unlike those wankers in the Clash, who were either totally naïve or incredibly cynical, New Model Army seem to have no illusions that their music can change the world.

Instead they rage on in the face of futility, knowing it’s a sucker’s game. And they’re not falling for any of that “the meek shall inherit the earth” bullshit either, as they sing in folk/post-punk “The Ballad of Bodmin Pill”: “How we all dance with this fire ’cause it’s all that we know/And as the spotlight turns toward us, we all try our best to show/We are lost we are freaks, we are crippled, we are weak/We are the heirs, we are the true heirs, to all the world.” Sullivan is not implying that their inheritance will be one of plenty; No, theirs will always be an inheritance of suffering, and injustice, and powerlessness in the face of the haves, who have always ruled the world and always will.

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Journey weren’t always the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. Before they rocked the earth on its axis with such absolutely essential MOR smasheroos as “Wheel in the Sky,” “Lights” (an even greater salute to San Francisco than Starship’s “We Built This City”!), “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and “Hustler” (okay, so that one’s not so great) the MOR giants from Rice-a-Roni City were that best of all possible things, a progressive rock/jazz fusion band. Right up there with such titans as Kansas, Return to Forever, and Spock’s Beard even!

Surprised? I sure am! Why, it’s like finding out the Sex Pistols began their career with a triple album (played solely on Moog synthesizers and tubular bells) called Moonbeams Refracted by the Gleaming Enamel of Parachuting Molars released under the name of Odysseus’ Merkin! Or that the New Dolls started as a jazz fusion band called, I don’t know, Bent Oxygen! But if it’s news it’s wonderful news, because as everybody knows Journey can do no wrong, even if the Journey that put out their 1975 debut Journey had yet to include the super-dynamic Steve Perry, whose magic flying tonsils wouldn’t arrive on the scene until October 10, 1977, a day that will live infamy!

Later guitarist extra ordinaire Neal Schon would say, “I still think some of the stuff we did then was great. Some of it was self-indulgent, just jamming for ourselves, but I also think a lot of other things hurt us in the early days. It took a while for the politics to sort of shape up.” Self-indulgent? Why, I’ve never heard that one used in conjunction with progressive rock before! And politics? Does Journey have its own form of government? A constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature perhaps? But I digress.

You’re probably not familiar with Journey’s debut unless you’re a hardcore Journey fan (smartest rock fans in the world) or just plain unlucky, as it seems I am. But please allow me to extract tongue from cheek and turn to an honest discussion of the songs on Journey. And the good news—relatively speaking—is that while I’m no fan of either progressive rock or jazz fusion, Journey approach them from a hard rock angle.

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Just how great are Black Oak Arkansas? Well rock critic Ubermensch Robert Christgau once posed the question of why they couldn’t fill NYC’s Academy of Music on a Saturday night after two years of relentless touring and then answered it himself with the words, “Because unlike most similar bands they have never achieved competence—they are actively untalented, incapable of even an interesting cop.”

Is that a glowing endorsement or what? But if you ask me Christgau was missing the point. If you have a sense of humor and a taste for the totally inexplicable those are the very qualities that make Black Oak Arkansas so great! I mean, ANYBODY can be competent! And talent’s bullshit! The Police were talented, and they should have been arrested! Eric Clapton is talented! Talent kills!

Black Oak Arkansas were working at a level of total inspiration that made basic proficiency much less mastery irrelevant, starting from the day they stole the PA from their high school and set up in an abandoned grain bin at the outskirts of the tiny burg they’d name themselves after and commenced to produce such an ear-splitting din that it took the cops all of ten minutes or so to swoop down on ‘em and not only pull the plug but arrest them for grand larceny, after which they were sentenced to TWENTY-SIX YEARS at some horrifying penal farm, although the sentence was later suspended. But there’s a lesson in there—playing the sounds they heard in their collective unhinged head could have put them away for decades, and it that ain’t the spirit of rock ’n’ roll, what is?

Black Oak Arkansas was a band of renegade long-haired redneck Krishna Baptists at the bizarro fringe of the southern rock movement who liked to sing about the halls of Karma and called themselves “mutants of the monster” and lived at one with nature in some kind of hairy hippie commune in the sticks where they perfected their totally incompetent but always electrifying and utterly unique brand of radioactive psychedelic southern rock, complete with their own three-guitar army and a drummer who liked to play solos with his bare hands, perhaps because he couldn’t afford drum sticks. But if so, why didn’t he just steal some? Arkansas is Purdue Country and literally crawling with chickens!

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Celebrating Dave Hill, born on this day in 1946. —Ed.

These lovable Wolverhampton cheaters at Scrabble certainly never won a spelling bee, and one of ‘em (guitarist Dave Hill) walked around in a mullet so hideous it could even get you evicted from an Alabama trailer park, and come to think of it, the whole bunch of ‘em looked pretty silly in their Glam clobber, but we’re talking about the great Slade here so–cum on feel the noize! Because when it comes to irresistibly catchy (and irreducibly simple) rabble rousers (they perfected the whole stomp and clap thing long before Queen came along with “We Will Rock You”) Slade can’t be beat.

Slade may have abandoned their braces and boots Oi roots to climb aboard the Big Glam Bandwagon, but they never forgot their rowdy West Midlands yob origins– “Cum On Feel the Noize,” “Gudbuy T’ Jane,” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” are all rafters-shaking boot boy anthems. Not for nothing did Hill wear the words “Super Yob” on the breastplate of his pointy-shouldered space doofus stage costume.

The “Brummie oiks” (thanks Barney Hoskyns!) in Slade were the friendliest bunch of Wulfrunian lager louts you’d ever want to meet, preferring cheery sing alongs in the great English pub tradition to sticking a broken bottle in your mug. They also had a quiet side and a sentimental streak a mile wide, not that you’d know it if you lived in the States, which only got to meet Slade’s crazee Mr. Hyde persona.

This is certainly the case on the truncated US version of the band’s 1973 singles compilation Sladest. The Reprise Records “American version” compiles the band’s eight UK hit singles up to that date along with the newly released single “My Friend Stan” and its B-Side “My Town,” whilst leaving such quieter (and vaguely Beatlesesque!) songs as “Pouk Hill” and “One Way Hotel” by the side of the musical motorway.

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Bob Seger was thirty and practically a geriatric (thirty is sixty in rock years!) when 1976’s Night Moves finally took him nationwide, big time. It came as a surprise. Seger seemed destined to spend his career as a journeyman—a big fish (although hardly as hip a fish as The Stooges, the MC5 and Alice Cooper) in the Detroit area, just another band everywhere else. He was a second-tier rocker who put on high-energy rock shows and had written some great songs including the 1968 classic “2 +2 = ?”and 1975’s “Beautiful Loser,” none of which—with the exception of 1968’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”—broke into the American Top Forty.

He began his recording career with the Bob Seger System before going solo and then forming the crack Detroit unit Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, but fame eluded him until Night Moves (with its title track, which may well be the greatest and most poignant song ever written about growing old and looking back) went to No. four on the charts. It says everything you need to know about Seger’s genius that “Night Moves” sounds like the work of a much older man—thirty is a bit early to be singing about autumn closing in. But Seger pulled it off with ease, perhaps because all that touring left him wise beyond his years.

Night Moves broke Seger, but he made his first inroad towards national attention with the previous year’s two-fer Live Bullet with The Silver Bullet Band. Recorded at Detroit’s Cobo Hall before a vocal and partisan crowd, Live Bullet is a galvanizing non-stop hard rock party and call to arms. Live Bullet demonstrates that Seger was a no-frills roots rocker with a voice that was all road grit who put on an electrifying live show, heavy on irresistible, high-octane, old-school scorchers that should have made him a star but didn’t. And the covers (of songs by Tina Turner, Van Morrison, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry) are barnstormers as well. When the announcer at album’s open shouts, “You are here because you want the real thing!” he isn’t fooling.

Seger projects almost as well as John Fogarty—he may have been in Cobo Hall, but I’ll bet you the kids could hear him giving it his all in North Dakota’s Iron Range. And Seger and band seemed to have a constitutional aversion to going the ballad/love song route or even going the speed limit; aside from “Turn the Page” and “Jody Girl,” the adrenaline never flags. Simple, loud and fast: it’s the oldest formula there is, but there’s a reason Seger would go on to sing about loving that old time rock and roll—he loved that old time rock and roll. It’s an awful song, granted, and a real blot on his permanent record, but a true reflection of his Chuck Berry-loving self.

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Celebrating Jim “Dandy” Mangrum in advance of his 76th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Black Oak Arkansas may well be—and I say this with affection, and as a fan—the most stunningly inept band in the history of rock. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau once rhetorically asked why Black Oak—despite relentless touring and a big name tour manager—still couldn’t “sell out the Academy of Music on a Saturday night.” His answer: “They are actively untalented, incapable of even an interesting cop.”

Me, I think Christgau’s right about Black Oak’s incompetence, but wrong about everything else. I find Black Oak Arkansas tremendously interesting, exciting even, thanks in large part to the uncanny vocal acrobatics of the perpetually shirtless James “Jim Dandy” Mangrum. I find it hard to describe Mangrum’s voice except by comparing it to the pitching of Dock Ellis on that immortal June night in 1970 when he threw a no-hitter while on acid. Ellis’ pitches may have been all over the place—he walked eight batters, and probably narrowly missed hitting and killing a few more—but nobody could touch them, because Ellis was possessed.

And so it goes for Mangrum. He can’t carry a tune in his purse, and is likely to go from a macho growl to high-pitched keening to flat out making rabid possum noises in the amount of time it took me to write this sentence. And it’s not like he’s trying. For the horrible truth is that Big Jim has no control of the sounds coming out of his mouth whatsoever. All he can do is let rip and hope nobody gets hurt. It’s scary but in a wonderful way, that is if you possess a sense of humor and are wearing a state-of-the-art batting helmet.

The band’s 1972 sophomore LP Keep the Faith includes all of the hallmarks of the Black Oak Arkansas sound—a three-guitar attack that is far too psychedelic to fit neatly into the “Southern Rock” genre, a barely competent backbeat, and the snake oil ululations of Mangrum, who pitches his vocals just about everywhere but over the plate. And despite what Christgau says, Black Oak Arkansas has some more than decent songs on offer, even if the boys in the band don’t exactly do a stellar job of performing them.

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It’s safe to say that 1972’s glam-infused Transformer will always be ex-Velvet Undergounder and Andy Warhol acolyte Lou Reed’s signature album, his biggest crowd pleaser and the one he’ll best be remembered for. It was certainly the album that finally transformed him (see “album title as self-fulfilling prophecy”) from cult figure amongst the decadent NYC demimonde to rock star—songs like “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day” finally brought him a listenership commensurate with his talents. But is it his best album? Is it even a great album? Hell, is it even a good album? Does it live up its exalted rep?

One thing is certain—Reed would never record a solo album that matched the brilliance of the albums he released with the Velvet Underground. Never even came close. He released strong albums, weak albums, middling albums, annoyingly boring high-brow albums (1992’s Magic and Loss), viscerally powerful albums (1982’s The Blue Mask), depressing-as-fuck albums (1973’s bummer Berlin) and eleven live albums that ran the gamut from great (1974’s Rock n Roll Animal) to beyond-belief bad (1978’s “comedy record” Lou Reed Live: Take No Prisoners).

He also bequeathed us perhaps the biggest fuck you to his fans this side of Dylan’s Self Portrait (1975’s immortal Metal Machine Music) and a couple of collaborations both pretentious and boring (1990’s Songs for Drella with John Cale and 2011’s much-denigrated Lulu with Metallica). Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t trade the lot of them for the Velvet Underground’s final album, 1970’s Loaded. Hell, the only Reed solo albums I ever listen to are Rock n Roll Animal, 1975’s Coney Island Baby, and The Blue Mask, and I’m rarely at a loss for reasons NOT to listen to them.

Everybody knows the background of Transformer. Reed’s debut solo album was a good-to-excellent commercial dud, and Reed (as he always had) wanted to be a star. Who doesn’t? So along comes David Bowie who’s like the It Person of the Galaxy thanks to his androgynous space alien Ziggy Stardust shtick and Lou, smitten by glam and Bowie’s openness about his bisexuality and hoping some of the Zigster’s glitter dust would rub off, asked Bowie and Spiders from Mars guitarist and mad genius arranger Mick Ronson to produce his next album.

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Celebrating Lady Gaga, born on this day in 1986. —Ed.

I’ll be the first to admit I sold Lady Gaga short when she detonated like a hyper-sexualized glitter bomb on the pop scene with her 2008 debut LP The Fame. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta sounded like a brazen Madonna copycat to me, and if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a cheap Lower East Side Madonna knock-off. Ms. Ciccone and I go back too far.

Ah, but then her Gaganess sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair, and said an astounding and wonderful thing. Namely, “I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.”

I mean, wow. Those words hit me like a diamond bullet smack in the third eye. Because NOBODY who says crazy shit like that can be written off as fake goods. No, I knew right then and there that Lady Gaga was a stone American original, and deserving of the kind of same degree of unwavering respect as the Dali Lama, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Kanye “This hat makes me feel like Superman!” West.

Why, I haven’t heard such naked honesty since Little Richard said, “The only thing I like better than a big penis is a bigger penis.” And with her refreshing candidness in mind I promptly sat down to listen to Lady Gaga with new ears.

My favorite and your favorite and the whole world’s favorite is “Poker Face,” Lady Gaga’s robotic anthem to both 7-card stud and studs in general. It’s both a great piece of stutter synth and a tribute to “The Song of the Vulga Boatmen,” and in muh muh muh opinion one of the most dance-floor friendly songs to come along since John Travolta invented the dance floor.

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Celebrating Steven Tyler on his 76th birthday. —Ed.

Back in the day I went back on forth on Boston Very Baked Beans like a yoyo–liked ‘em in high school, loathed ‘em in college, then did what any sane person would do and put ‘em out of mind altogether. “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” didn’t exactly make me want to keep abreast of what Aerosmith was up to.

First year in the dorms at Shippensburg College Aerosmith were inescapable, what with my floor’s resident dope dealers Sheesh and Shrooms cranking the Toxic Twins around the clock, and I’ll never forget the day in the dining hall I warned ‘em Aerosmith would rot their brains, and if they really wanted to improve their minds they’d switch to Frank Zappa! Who at the time, if I recall correctly, was producing such IQ-raising fare as “Crew Slut” and “Wet T-Shirt Nite”!

Yeah, I was full of shit for sure. Because like ‘em or not, Aerosmith were on to something. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and the boys fused the New York Dolls’ glam-rock sleaze with Led Zeppelin’s sonic bombast to produce a brand new kinda high-stepping boogie strut. Aerosmith translated the leer into sound, brought David Johansen’s trash raunch aesthetic to the unwashed masses, and gleefully knocked the blues topsy-turvy, tossing in a whole bunch of dirty limericks in the process.

Theirs was garage rock of a sort, but the garage had a supercharged 1964 Pontiac GTO in it. Fact is Aerosmith boogied faster than almost any machine on the streets back in 1975. Punk was considered the fleetest thing on wheels at the time, but the title track of Toys in the Attic crosses the finish line before anything on Never Mind the Bollocks, and it came out a year and a half earlier! And Tyler’s nursery rhymes for adults are anything but dumb–anybody who can fit poor Paul Getty’s ear into a lyric is A-OK by me.

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Celebrating Elton John on his 77th 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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Does anybody out there actually LIKE Blood, Sweat & Tears? I mean, is it even POSSIBLE? Actually I know it’s possible because my friend Rick Piel likes them, openly admits it, and I’m doing my best to forgive him. Then again, what’s NOT to like about them? The bloviating brass? The rearguard horn arrangements of swingin’ Fred Lipsius? The big-boned vocal cords of the burly Mr. David Clayton-Thomas? The occasional classical flourishes? Hell, the real question is why doesn’t EVERYBODY love them?

Well, part of the answer lies in the fact that Blood, Sweat & Tears were the epitome of unhip. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—the Carpenters were so unhip that the renowned music critic Richard M. Nixon labelled them “Young America at its best.” But BS&T thought they were hip, when in fact they made the exploding dicks in Three Dog Night sound downright groovy by comparison.

And they didn’t help their own case by being the first rock band to wow the squares at Las Vegas, which automatically made them square by association. You are who you play for. Nor did they up their street cred any by agreeing to do a US State Department-sponsored tour of the Eastern bloc. Doing the bidding of the Nixon Administration didn’t win them any friends in the counterculture, and the counterculture let them know it—Abbie Hoffman and his Yippie pals showed up at a BS&T gig at Madison Square Garden after the band’s return to throw shit at them, and by shit I mean the kind you make with your butt.

But BS&T’s hip cred—which basically went out the window when band co-founder and certifiably hip personage Al Kooper walked out the door and the Broadway-ready David Clayton-Thomas walked in after the band’s 1968 debut LP—isn’t really the issue here. What made Blood, Sweat & Tears such a nauseating proposition was the horn-heavy band’s diabolical commitment to a big, brassy sound that combined fugitive elements of rock, jazz, R&B and (gak!) classical. The fusion was inarguable innovative—but then again so was the weaponization of anthrax—and made them the envy of every high school jazz band instructor from San Jose to Saigon.

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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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Here’s a joke for ya: What do you call a glam rock band coming out of Florida in the early seventies? Deceased. Because as everybody knows Gator Country was Southern Rock territory, the natural-born stomping grounds of the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Outlaws and a slew of lesser lights. And if there was one thing guaranteed to make the most rearguard redneck fans of said bands (and even the gators wandering around like they owned the place) see red it was a band of limp-wristed fops in platform boots with stars painted on their faces, lowering the region’s nationwide high testosterone levels. Why, that’s the kind of damn fool stunt that could get a fella murderized.

But as impossible as it sounds Florida did produce an honest-to-God glam band in the early Seventies, and nobody killed them! They went by the name White Witch, and the first I heard of them was from a friend whose description of them went, “They were Ziggy Stardust come to Florida.” Well those words were like manna from Heaven to me—I just had to check White Witch out.

And all I can say having heard them is they were far weirder than I could have ever imagined. For the simple reason that they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be a glam rock band or a boogie band or a metal band or (and I’m not kidding here) a progressive rock band. Not only were they “Ziggy Stardust come to Florida” they were “Styx come to Florida,” and try to wrap that around your frontal lobe if you can. What were these guys doing? Did they not realize they were making your more combative Skynyrd fans shit Confederate battle flags?

Which isn’t to say they didn’t have some redneck in ‘em. Chuck Eddy, who put White Witch’s second and final album, 1974’s A Spiritual Greeting, at No. 266 on his list of the 500 best heavy metal albums in the universe, wrote that lead singer Ronn Goedert possessed “the craziest hickmetal throat this side of Mistah Jim Dandy himself,” and he’s right. A True Son of the South, Ronn Goedert, but it’s what he did with those Dixie tonsils of his, and what the band was doing around him as he was exercising said tonsils, that made all the difference. Cosmic rock wasn’t altogether taboo south of the Mason-Dixon line—just check out Black Oak Arkansas’ epic walk-through-the-halls-of-karma “Mutants of the Monster” if it’s proof you’re looking for.

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