Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Not so long ago I wrote that it was a positive disgrace and blot on the historical record that the only live album by the Faces—one of the most exciting live bands of their time—was 1974’s thoroughly lackluster Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners, which was released only to fulfill a contractual obligation and didn’t even feature big-hearted bassist/vocalist Ronnie Lane, who’d split the group in a pique over the fact that the Faces had become little more than burgeoning solo star Rod Stewart’s backing band. It’s a terrible album, long out of print, but it has a fine cover. If you buy albums for their covers, I heartily recommend you find yourself a copy.

Well the historical record has been corrected, and then some. On September 6, 2024 Rhino Records, obvious subscribers to the belief that half measures avail us nothing, released Faces at the BBC: Complete BBC Concert and Session Recordings, an eight-CD/Blu-ray box set that weighs 84 pounds and comes complete with a “lavish” 48-page booklet and for all I know (I don’t own an actual copy) an authentic Rod the Mod urine sample (clearly inebriated!) and a novelty fish wall plaque that turns its head, opens its mouth and sings the chorus to “Stay with Me.” Evidently it took time and effort to track down these recordings, some of which had been thought lost. When I lose something it stays lost. Just ask my David Bowie Aladdin Sane t-shirt. I bet the sleuths at Rhino Records could find it in a heartbeat.

Thanks largely to famed DJ John Peel, the Faces recorded extensively for the BBC—evidently the “Beeb” felt the band was too frivolous and alcohol-friendly for airplay. The complete BBC sessions features eighty-five songs, which is far more songs than the band ever recorded during their short (1970–73) tenure on this planet. True, many of the songs were from Stewart’s solo albums, on which most of the other members of the Faces played. And some don’t appear on any of the albums recorded during the period in question.

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Remembering Barry White, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.

You’ve got to hand it to Love Man Barry White; his lubricious bass-baritone croon could charm the panties off anything–woman, man, antelope, albacore tuna–you name it. Hell, I bet you he could have induced sexual stimulation in a rock had he set his mind to it. There’s just something about that low flame timbre of his that makes you want to shout, “Ravish me, grossly overweight and not all that physically attractive soul man!”

Back in the seventies, the greatest Barry this side of Manilow ruled the airwaves like a weapon of mass seduction. His was a late-night, dim-the-lights, bedroom sound, and Barry wasn’t shy when it came to expressing his needs; on “Love Serenade” he sings, “I wanna see you the way you came into the world/I don’t wanna feel no clothes/I don’t wanna see no panties… “ Subtle he wasn’t. Indeed, White’s erotic entreaties bordered on comedy, and the parodists have been making hay of him for years; in an episode of The Simpsons, Bart and Lisa use Barry’s croon to lull vipers.

Musically, pop music’s biggest sex addict mixed R&B, soul, and funk, and is credited with helping to usher in the disco era with 1973’s “Love Theme,” by Barry’s backing unit The Love Unlimited Orchestra, whom The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau once hilariously dismissed as “Barry’s Jackie Gleason tribute band.”

Sadly—I love the thing myself—”Love Theme” is not included on 1975’s Barry White’s Greatest Hits, which remains the one-stop shopper’s LP of choice. Barry plays the role of sexsuasier (a French word I just made up!) to the hilt, and the mood rarely deviates from the lewdly priapic. Some of the songs sweep you along on string power alone, while others are midnight slow and give Barry the opportunity to ply his patented brand of dirty talk, but they’re all as heavy as the man himself.

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Celebrating Don Powell on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

So there I was, listening to Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch and being all jazzbo pretentious and shit, when really deep down inside I was miserable when it hit me—what I needed at that moment was not the chill vibraphonic rebop of Bobby Hutcherson, but the atrocious spelling, abominable haircuts, and abysmal glitter gear of those inimitable Black Country lads, Slade.

It may be easy to make fun of ‘em, but the quartet ruled the UK charts in the early ’70s, with artists like Roxy Music and David Bowie eating their dust. And vocalist Noddy Holder and the boys have been cited as an influence by everybody from Twisted Sister and Nirvana. Not bad for a couple of skinheads-turned-glamsters from Wolverhampton, whose misspellings, I kid you not, led to protests by an entire nation’s worth of outraged school marms.

The band’s classic line-up (Holder on vocals, guitar, and bass; Dave Hill on guitar, vocals and bass; Jim Lea on bass, vocals, keyboards, violin, and guitar; and Don Powell on drums and percussion) was formed in 1969 as Ambrose Slade. Their first album tanked, and they abandoned their skinhead look due to its negative association with football hooliganism. The “Ambrose” went too, and following the release of some poorly spelled hits and a well-received live album the band blew out the pipes with LP #3, Slayed?

Filled with anthemic sing-alongs, Slayed? remains one of glitter rock’s seminal albums, despite the fact that the toughs in Slade looked about as absurd in their Glam clobber as Mott the Hoople looked in theirs. Holder wore a mirror top hat, tartan pants with suspenders, and striped socks, while Hill sported an ungodly Prince Valiant haircut and silver outfits that made him look like an alien with a retarded Venusian hair stylist. But who cares? The kids ate it up.

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Billy Gibbons is an open-minded guy. While I was busy hating the English synthpop likes of Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the leader of Texas legends ZZ Top was listening to them, and enough light bulbs were going off in his head to illuminate all 1,954 miles of the US-Mexico border.

Anybody who thought Gibbons of the La Grange laugh and Methusaleh beard was some front-porch blues and boogie purist was sadly mistaken—Billy dug the synthesizers, and Billy dug the drum machines, and most of all Billy dug the acceleration—the more beats per minute the better. And they all set him to thinking—if Black Oak Arkansas could bring electricity to Arkansas, why couldn’t ZZ Top bring New Wave to the Lone Star State? And become MTV Gods and make a bazillion dollars in the process?

It didn’t happen all at once, but it all came together on 1983’s Eliminator, easily one of the slickest, glossiest, supercharged, and yes weirdest albums ever to blow across the finish line between your ears, sending tumblin’ tumbleweeds a’ tumblin’ in all directions. An unholy fusion of down home blooz-boogie and the latest in studio technology, it put plenty a purist off his BBQ, but by gum it exploded out of the speakers just like that 1933 Ford Coupe in the band’s star-making videos.

And they kept what counted most; Billy still sounded like the biggest lecher this side of the Rio Grande, and his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard still had enough Texas hot sauce on it to burn ears from Houston to Honolulu. And each and every rip-snortin’ power chord reminds me of a boast from a previous album; “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.”

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By the way, which one’s Crosby? It’s a logical question: like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young this Spanish foursome deserted other bands to form a supergroup, and like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young they seem to have owned the kinds of egos that demanded that they see their individual names in lights. They could have called themselves Los Cacahuetes, after all. And the timeline is right; they put out their first and most famous album, Señora Azul, in 1974.

Unlike CSN&Y, however, their album tanked, and it took decades for fans and critics to come around to the opinion that it was a classic. The fans hated it, the critics loathed it, and I couldn’t tell you what Spain’s then dictator-for-life Generalissimo Francisco Franco—he would kick the fascist bucket the following year—thought of it, but I doubt he was a folk rock guy and if he had been he’d have promptly had them shot.

The band’s members were Juan Robles Cánovas, Rodrigo García, Adolfo Rodríguez, and José María Guzmán. García and Guzmán hailed from the band Solera; Rodrigo from Los Pekenikes and, before that, a Colombian group called The Speakers. Cánovas, surprisingly, had a progressive rock background as drummer for Módulos. They’re pretty horrible. Check out their cover of “Hello, Goodbye” if you get the chance; you won’t be able to say goodbye fast enough. Adolfo was previously the vocalist and guitarist of the psychedelia-tinged pop group Los Íberos. Listen to them long enough and you will grow to like them and hate yourself for it.

The winner-to-loser ratio of Señora Azul (that’s Blue Lady in Inglais) is well above 50 percent, and several of its songs are quite good indeed. The folk rock numbers can be quite powerful, and aside from an overly delicate love song or two and a failed attempt at whimsical pop, there are none I’d turn over to Franco’s secret police. And they throw in a country rocker or two that have real push. And like CSN&Y, they throw in some nice vocal harmonies, especially on the title track.

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Remembering Freddie Mercury, born on this day in 1946. —Ed.

It’s a shame, when you think about it. All the great albums I never heard growing up because (1) I could rarely afford the cost of an LP, and (2) there was no great or even half-decent FM radio station within listening range of the one half-horse town (the other half of the horse was owned by nearby Harney, and they got the front end) I called home.

Take Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack. Never heard it. Never heard of Queen period until “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which I should have liked but didn’t because I thought it was too camp. Too camp! This from a guy who spent the better part of his adolescence idolizing Elton John. But that’s the way I roll. I didn’t like the pitch of Freddie Mercury’s voice, or the band’s lush and ubiquitous vocal harmonies, and as for the songs, they were too structurally baroque for my primitivist tastes. In hindsight, I was a little punk in the making. My attitude was keep it simple, which was why I never liked progressive rock, period, until I started to get high and listened to my fair share of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis.

And if I didn’t like Queen much to begin with, I really disliked them after they put out those bookend hits, “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You.” To me they sounded like pseudo-fascistic declarations of supremacy, and I thought then and still think now their Übermensch shtick would have gone over like gangbusters at the Nuremburg Rallies. The line “no time for losers” offends me as much as any line in rock history, which is why I never listened to 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack even after I knew it existed. I thought of Queen as a bunch of snotty high-pitched twats whose songs were too complicated for their own good, and wrote them off as bad rubbish.

But there is a time and a place for everything, and now is the time to give Queen their chance at rocking my world. And guess what, they have. Sheer Heart Attack isn’t the perfect LP, but it includes a slew of cool songs I like, even if some of their affectations continue to irk me. Bottom line: Any band with a guitarist as good as Brian May, and that can come up with a line as good as “Give me a good guitar/And you can say my hair’s a disgrace” is okay with me.

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Celebrating Steve Jones, born on this day in 1955. —Ed.

Well here it is–the first and best punk album ever vomited upon an unsuspecting public. And I don’t want to hear any naysaying or quibbling. With 1977’s Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten and Company fired a shot heard round the world, and the aftershocks of this LP will be felt as long as kids continue to form punk bands, which is forever.

Never Mind the Bollocks sounds every bit as snotty and uncompromising as the day it was released, but hindsight affords us the opportunity to look at where it fits into the history of rock ’n’ roll. The first thing I would note is how much it has in common with smart English hard rock. Given a large quantity of speed and set loose in the studio, Mott the Hoople might have sounded like this. Which brings us to another point. Like Mott’s Ian Hunter, Johnny Rotten is one smart bloke. He may not have attended Oxford, but our lad Johnny had a knack for saying what was on his mind. And he summed up what was on his mind when he said, “Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.”

The songs on Never Mind the Bollocks are slower than I remember, and their sound is fuller; they don’t have that razor-thin edge one associates with, say, the Ramones or the Clash. And they don’t have the pop overtones of those bands either. Listen to the Ramones now and they sound like a bubblegum band; the Sex Pistols don’t blow bubbles and their songs might as well be Brighton rock. The Sex Pistols roar thank to Steve Jones’ blunderbuss guitar, and Johnny Rotten is purest ferocity. The Sex Pistols produce a ferocious din, and I can’t think of a punk band that has ever come close to equaling them in sheer savagery.

I prefer the cartoon nihilism of the Sex Pistols to the pretend revolutionary tendencies of the Clash; if nothing else, cartoon nihilism is far funnier. By “cartoon nihilism” I mean to imply that the anarchy advocated by this band probably goes no further than ripping the occasional car radio antenna off. I do not mean to suggest Johnny Rotten’s disgust, hatred, and bile are not real. It only takes a few seconds of LP opener “Anarchy in the U.K.” to demonstrate the man isn’t just taking the piss.

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Celebrating Van Morrison in advance of his 79th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

It is unfortunate that my only clear image of the great Van Morrison is at The Band’s Last Waltz, where the pudgy Morrison, resplendent in an awful brown pants suit speckled with sequins, ends a sublime version of “Caravan” with a series of ludicrous leg kicks, all of which are unintentionally hilarious. I always have to remind myself that Morrison—with his “little fireplug body” to quote Lester Bangs—is one of the Immortals, and that his 1968 album Astral Weeks is one of the best rock LPs ever recorded and certainly in my Top Ten, and this despite the fact that I don’t even like half of its eight songs.

Less an LP than a spiritual attempt to storm Heaven, Astral Weeks showed Van Morrison to be a seeker in search of some unreachable mystical plane—like John Coltrane, only playing a kind of jazz-folk hybrid instead of free jazz. His vocal phrasing speaks to this search; he repeats words, stuttering and stammering and scatting his way to a breakthrough to some otherworldly place, while the mostly jazz musicians behind him play ethereally lovely melodies that provide the perfect counterpoint to his quest. I will go out on a limb and say this is more than just Morrison’s masterpiece—it’s the most spiritual rock LP ever produced, and Morrison the visionary’s most perfect expression of his attempt to utter the unutterable.

Astral Weeks was Morrison’s second LP. Recorded in 1967 with a crew of jazzmen only one of whom he’d met or played with, he told them to more or less wing it, and they did, to remarkable effect. Not everybody liked this approach; “No prep, no meeting,” said double bassist Richard Davis, whose remarkable playing dominates the contributions of his fellow musicians. “He was remote from us, ’cause he came in and went into a booth… And that’s where he stayed, isolated in a booth. I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, nor we to him…”

The Velvet Underground’s John Cale—who was recording in an adjoining studio—echoed Davis’ comments about Morrison isolating himself from his fellow players, saying, “Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes.” But this is untrue; Morrison WAS in a separate booth, but the other musicians were playing along in another room, all but the strings and horns that is, which were recorded after the songs had been recorded.

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Ten bonus points and a dead baby if you can tell me which album John Lydon called his favorite of all time. All time! That means he likes it more than KC and the Sunshine Band’s The Sound of Sunshine or the Eagles’ Hotel California even! Unimaginable! Well, if the dead babies reference didn’t tip you off, which it certainly should have, the former Johnny Rotten’s favorite rock album in the whole wide world, including the Sammy Johns record with “Chevy Van” on it, is Alice Cooper’s Killer.

1971’s Killer followed hard on the heels of that same year’s breakthrough LP for the band, Love It to Death. Which I prefer to Killer, but who cares? I’m not John Lydon. Anyway, Killer cemented the band’s reputation for writing songs of macabre weirdness, which they milked for all they were worth with a live show that included decapitations, gallows, giant snakes, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, 7,000 showgirls wearing glitter-encrusted Nazi jackboots and porcupine-spike bras, a full-scale reenactment of the crash of the Hindenburg, and an elderly Dr. Josef Mengele playing cowbell.

Okay, so I exaggerate. But the band’s gory and fantabulous live show delighted teens while deeply disturbing parents, who were convinced that Cooper’s magically morbid extravaganzas were going to instantaneously transform their kiddies into wild-eyed axe murderers. Which made the kids love it even more!

I’ve said before that the perfect LP would have combined the first three tracks of Love It to Death—in which guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce play like men possessed by the Devil—and the first two tracks and “Dead Babies” from Killer. But that’s not the way it went down, and I have to (resentfully) live with it. I suspect they had slave-like contractual obligations with their record label that obligated them to put out two albums in 1971, when they’d have been much better served by only releasing one. That was how things were often done back in the day, when record companies behaved much in the same way as antebellum southern plantation owners.

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Remembering Sterling Morrison, born on this date in 1942. —Ed.

Choosing your favorite Velvet Underground studio LP (and I’m talking here about the famous four released between 1967 and 1970) is a helluva lot tougher than choosing your favorite Beatle. I mean, everybody KNOWS who their favorite Beatle is, but if you’re like me, your fave VU album varies in response to a whole lot of variables including mood (Angry? Gimme White Light/White Heat! Euphoric? Make mine The Velvet Underground!), romantic status, drug intake (Bad trip? Gimme White Light/White Heat again!) and for all I know barometric pressure.

At this moment in time 1970’s Loaded, the Velvet Underground’s final studio album (if you don’t count 1973’s Squeeze, that Doug Yule solo LP featuring none of the Velvets we all know and love) is at the top of my list, and this despite the fact that in many ways it’s the least “Velvet Underground” of the VU’s quartet of great studio albums.

Why? Because for a multitude of reasons that have yet to be explained–although I’m certain poor mental health, burnout, business worries, and galloping drug abuse had a lot to do with it–on Loaded Lou Reed saw fit to offload a lot of the heavy lifting on to Doug Yule, the rather faceless fellow who stepped into John Cale’s shoes at Lou Reed’s behest in 1968. Yule may be an outlier in your standard Velvet Underground hagiography, but he sings lead on four of Loaded’s ten songs, plays lead guitar on some more, and plays some of the LP’s most fiery solos–and all of this in addition to playing bass, piano, and organ. Oh, and he also plays drums on half of the album’s songs, as Maureen Tucker was on maternity leave and didn’t play on the album, although she’s credited on the LP for doing so.

It can be argued, of course, that the only real “listenable” difference lies in Yule’s newfound prominence as a singer, and that even this is no big deal seeing as how he and Lou sound so much alike that even The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau saw fit to praise Lou’s vocals on “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” when it was actually Yule singing. Hell, for a long time I thought that was Lou singing on “Who Loves the Sun”–he didn’t quite sound himself, it’s true, but I wrote it off to an oddly adulterated batch of methamphetamine.

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Celebrating Wayne Osmond, born on this day in 1951. —Ed.

I used to know this rather dim garbage head who gobbled a handful of pills he thought were opiates but weren’t, and he swore—on a stack of ludes!—they didn’t do anything but make his waist-length hair stand straight up in the air and vibrate. I’m pretty sure his story was bullshit. That said, if you’re looking for an album that will do the same thing, you could do much worse than check out The Osmonds’ Crazy Horses.

You heard me right: The Osmonds. Because despite what you may have heard about Ogden, Utah’s finest, they weren’t a do-goodie, whiter-shade-of-pale tweenie-pop imitation of the Jackson Five but substance-abusing (they sometimes took as many as three aspirin at once!) Mormon mofos who took their Tang straight yet still managed to stand up on their hind legs and bray. And the culmination of their badassness was Crazy Horses, one of the greatest hard rock albums your ears will ever hear. And that’s not just me talking: in Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums, rock crit Chuck Eddy puts Crazy Horses at No. 66—which is too low in my opinion, but then everybody underestimates the Mormon Motörhead.

The brothers began their career as a barbershop quartet, The Osmond 5 (math is not taught in the schools of the Church of Latter Day Saints) before becoming worldwide superstars thanks to little brother Donny and the bubblegum classic “One Bad Apple.” Meanwhile, though, Donny’s older siblings were chomping at the bit. They wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and smoke fake cigarettes and change their name to The Gentile Killers. So they staged a coup of sorts, relieving Donny of lead singer duties to toughen up their sound while honing their protopunk chops by playing along to Hollies’ records until they were the five maddest, baddest, LDS-taking apples in the whole bunch, girl.

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Remembering Nik Turner, born on this day in 1940. —Ed.

Why go in search of space when you’ve already found it? You would have to ask the space rockers in Hawkwind, which on its 1971 sophomore LP In Search of Space takes you on an aural tour of the cosmic beyond on a psychedelic double-decker bus, pointing out the sites while reminding you, on “You Shouldn’t Do That,” to not feed the pulsating Day-Glo protoplasm. I know, I know—it looks friendly. But it will envelop your hand like the Blob, and have the rest of you for dessert.

What differentiated the early Hawkwind from their psychedelic rock brethren was their rich instrumental palette and decided Krautrock tendencies. They came at you with guitars, flute, saxophone, synthesizer, and audio generators, lots of audio generators. And they sure knew how to establish a killer drone. The almost sixteen-minute ”You Shouldn’t Do That” dispenses with choruses and bridges and all of that nonsense because they just kill the momentum—I doubt you’ll find any bridges in the furthest reaches of space, but who am I to say? I should have flunked physics (and would have had my teacher not been terrified of seeing me again) and for all I know the universe is one big chorus.

In Search of Space revs its engines with the aforementioned “You Shouldn’t Do That,” which opens with the sound of eon-glugging space whales, then rockets you into the psychosphere (a word I may have just made up!) at the speed of lava lamp. Nik Turner’s alto saxophone and what sounds to me like the whistling noise on Flipper’s “Sex Bomb” join some group vocals that sound like an endless repetition of “Chick-fil-A.”

After that Turner and electric guitarist Dave Brock really get down to business, accompanied by lots of soaring intergalactic noise (and some cool hissing), and my only problem are the lyrics, which reveal that like David Crosby and so many other freaks of the era, Hawkwind had a pathological fear of what Freud called “hippie hair castration,” as demonstrated by the lines “You try so hard to get somewhere/They put you down and cut your hair.”

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So just the other day I was at my girlfriend’s place and I told her I’d been listening to Belle and Sebastian. And she said in amazement, “You? You?? But they’re so… emo!” To which I replied, my voice reaching that high and buzzard-like Geddy Lee pitch that I can only attain when genuinely flubbergumbled, “Emo my ass! I hate those emo fuckers! Those irony-deficient shitbags! They’re too busy setting their wretchedly sensitive and self-absorbed high school diary poems to music to realize life is a hilarious cosmic joke at their expense! Belle and Sebastian are twee, damn it, and have a sense of humor! Just listen to “This Is Just a Modern Rock Song”! I mean, gak!… Grrr!”

And after that I descended into uttering outraged gibberish while my poor girlfriend cowered at the far end of the sofa, fishing around for her son’s bb gun, which she occasionally uses to put a sudden stop to my insane ranting. There is nothing like a bb to the solar plexus to shut you up, and fast.

In hindsight, I got all heated up because while the music of Belle and Sebastian is precious beyond words, and unremittingly lovely to boot, front man and pop genius Stuart Murdoch undercuts all that divine loveliness with smart and very sexually ambiguous lyrics in which boys who love boys settle for girls (they’re not as much trouble!) and girls who love girls settle for boys (they’re not as much trouble!).

Why, the unbearably sublime “Stars of Track and Field” from 1996’s If you’re feeling sinister alone is a hilarious study of the polymorphous perverse sexual mores of our oh so very sophisticated young people, what with the girl in question playing track and field for only one reason: to wear “terry underwear/And feel the city air/Run past your body.” And Murdoch finishes his “requiem” for said star of track and field by singing, “But when she’s on her back/She had the knowledge/To get her into college.”

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Like many another hungry band desperate to make a name for itself in the early seventies, England’s Silverhead jumped aboard the Glam bandwagon with both platform-booted feet, but if you’re expecting fey androgyny and campy signifiers of the Glam demimonde, forget about it—Silverhead was a hard rock outfit that owed its sound to the likes of Humble Pie, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and the Faces, and there isn’t enough glitter in the whole wide world to disguise the fact.

Silverhead didn’t exactly set the world on fire and only stuck around long enough to release two studio LPs, and nowadays hardly anybody remembers ‘em (sob!), but here’s the thing; they were a pretty damn good raunch ’n’ roll band, and the evidence to prove it is on their sophomore album, 1973’s 16 and Savaged.

The more I listen to 16 and Savaged the more I realize the whole glam thing is a gloss and overlay, if not an outright red herring; aside from the triumphant “Hello New York,” which is very New York Dolls in spirit, singer/actor (he went on to play a punk rocker in a 1978 episode of WKRP in Cincinati!) Michael Des Barres and the boys can only be termed a glitter rock band in the sense that they looked like a glitter band.

What they sound like to me is a band trapped between rock epochs; the tres catchy ”More Than Your Mouth Can Hold” may anticipate the rude punk attitude of the Dead Boy’s “Caught With the Meat in Your Mouth,” and (looking even further into the old crystal ball) the hair metal sleaze of Poison’s Open Up and Say… Ahh!, but it’s a streamlined boogie number at heart–ain’t nothing glam OR punk about Des Barre’s Rod Stewart meets Steve Marriott rasp.

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Celebrating Tom Johnston, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

I saw the Doobie Brothers live a long, long, time ago. It was an afternoon show at a suburban amphitheater, and I smoked a shitload of what I thought was pot but turned out to be PCP. And before long all the Doobies were 9-feet-tall and changing colors like chameleons, and played every single song at about 300 mph, in effect inventing hardcore. Or at least that’s how I remember it. That PCP was some good shit. I recommend it to everybody.

Nobody pays much attention to the Doobies nowadays, except to laugh at them. I know I laugh at them; I can’t even hear their name without cracking up. They were, even during their heyday, the least hip and most faceless big-name act in rock, and since then they’ve become the punch line to a joke that goes something like, “Why did the Doobie Brothers cross the road? To get away from the Doobie Brothers.”

Unhip and faceless the Doobs may have been, but back in the day they were big—scary big, in fact—with rock’s protletarian audiences (i.e., the same folks who loved BTO, Grand Funk, etc.). This can be attributed to one of two things. Either The Doobie Brothers were a pretty decent rock’n’roll band, or the musical wasteland of the early to mid-seventies left rock fans so hard up they were reduced to lapping up all manner of crapulous corporate swill, including the Dööbiemeisters.

I may be the only one, but I think it’s high time for a reassessment of the Doobie Brothers. And since their career was so neatly bifurcated into pre- and post-Michael McDonald periods, I decided it would be only fair to review 1976’s Best of the Doobies, which while skewed toward the band’s earlier work includes two McDonald-era songs, although it omits (because they were, duh, released later) such McDonald hits as “What a Fool Believes” and “Minute by Minute.”

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