Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Everybody hates a mystery. Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill Kennedy? What became of Amelia Earhart? Did D.B. Cooper survive his immortal parachute jump, and who was he, anyway? And so it goes with the 1966 LP LSD Underground 12, recorded by an anonymous band of musicians and so mythical and hard to find that people questioned whether it even existed in the first place.

Well, it does exist, even if the writer Byron Coley wrote for Forced Exposure, “Virtually nothing is known about who, why, or how the album was created.” Well, the why is easily answered. Right on the very cool black-and-white cover, it says, “Music composed and played by LSD-influenced musicians the only record of this type available!”

Well, that “the only record of this type available!” is debatable—several LPs featuring people on LSD were released before this one, but they were mostly acid jibber-jabber with some music thrown in. Think Ken Kesey’s March 1966 LP The Acid Test or Alan Watts’ 1962 LP This Is It. And there’s strong evidence to support the notion that John Coltrane’s classic quartet (with the addition of Pharoah Sanders and two other sidemen) recorded the 1965 LP Om on LSD, although it’s never been fully corroborated.

Like Om, LSD Underground 12 is music and all music, and just as freaky-deaky as you’d expect. Not as free form as you’d expect—the musicians don’t just make random noises and go off on weird individualistic head-trip tangents. Or play like their faces are melting and their instruments along with them.

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Celebrating Michael Bruce on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Alice Cooper, 1971; it’s almost enough to break your heart. Alice put out two LPs that year, Love It to Death and Killer, and both include a handful of incredibly great hard rockers combined with their fair share of duds, including a boring nine-minute workout on Love It to Death (“Black Juju”) and the equally coma-inducing eight-plus minute “Halo of Flies” on Killer.

I know bands were often contractually obligated to produce two LPs per annum back then, and that may or may not have had something to do with the limited number of fabulous tracks on both LPs. But imagine, just for a moment, had Alice Cooper put out just one album in 1971, an album containing the best songs from both LPs. The finished product would have been brilliant, and one of the best rock LPs of all time.

Alas, you can’t turn back the clock—if you could, I’d move it back to the glory days, when I could smoke tons of pot and not get paranoid—and we’re stuck forever with two woulda-coulda been tremendous albums marred by too many weak tracks to be called great.

As for the band, they got their start in Los Angeles on Frank Zappa’s Straight label, but following the disappointing sales of their sophomore LP (1970’s Easy Action) they up and moved to Pontiac, Michigan, where they fit in perfectly with bands like the Stooges and the MC5. Cooper himself blamed the band’s failure to make a mark in LA to drugs; “L.A. just didn’t get it,” he stated. “They were all on the wrong drug for us. They were on acid and we were basically drinking beer. We fit much more in Detroit than we did anywhere else.”

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Progressive rock will never die, but come the eighties panicky progressive rock musicians thought it had, and it led them to do the unthinkable—produce lame, MOR, watered-down pop prog (or in some cases just pop) music that was, and I find this almost impossible to fathom, even more unbearable than the pompous prog-opuses they’d inflicted on the world through their heyday in the early to mid-seventies.

From Tales of Topographic Oceans to “Owner of a Lonely Heart”—in no kind of world could that be called an improvement, and I’d sooner shoot myself in the dick than listen to the former.

GTR never got the traction that Asia or the post-Gabriel Genesis got, and for that reason, it’s a bit easier to hear the quiet desperation—at least the prog rockers turned pop-ulists in Asia and Genesis were scoring hits and getting paid. And one reason could be that GTR held on to at least some of the tenets of progressive rock. Unfortunately, they had no knack for writing hits.

GTR–a five-piece “supergroup” featuring Yes guitarist Steve Howe and Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett (hence the band name), along with journeyman vocalist Max Bacon, sessions bassist Phil Spalding, and sometime Marillion drummer Jonathan Mover—might have seemed like a great idea, but the guitar fireworks you’d expected never happen and the songs are formulaic, generic AOR shlock.

Musician reviewer J. D. Considine’s review of GTR in Musician was both succinct and spot-on. It read, in its entirety, “SHT.” Part of the blame lies with Buggles/Yes/Asia keyboardist Geoff Downes, who produced and went out of his way to highlight the clichéd vocals of prog-everyman Bacon, who never heard a song he couldn’t overemote on. The rest of the blame lies with the songs, which sound like they were written by a committee steadfastly dedicated to writing lowest-common-denominator progressive rock-lite, Starship-meets-Asia swill.

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Celebrating Greg Norton on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

Hard and fast rules so let’s dispense with the long instrumental intro and get right down to the nitty-gritty; on 1985’s New Day Rising, St. Paul, Minnesota power trio Hüsker Dü permanently set themselves apart from the hardcore pack by leavening the genre’s speed freak aesthetic with increasing dollops of real melody.

The results are still bracing, but New Day Rising is friendlier than most hardcore, and more welcoming too. Parts of it are even nice, nice in the way that the iconic album cover (two dogs, one beautiful body of water, a sunrise) is nice.

Most of the “nice” comes to us thanks to drummer/vocalist Grant Hart, who was the Jekyll to Bob Mould’s Hyde in what amounted to a schizophrenic division of band labor. Hart provided the melody, sweetness and light. Bob Mould provided the buzz saw guitar and angst; he may not have doing the fashionable by spitting bile at Reagan’s America, but his personal life sounded a hot mess. As for Greg Norton, he had a very cool mustache. And he played bass guitar.

New Day Rising is a sonic world away from Hüsker Dü’s 1982 debut Land Speed Record, a landmark in speedcore that more than lives up to its bragging title. But like their SST label mates the Minutemen and Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü soon chafed against the formal constraints of hardcore.

Unlike said bands, however, Hüsker Dü didn’t abandon hardcore altogether. Instead they set themselves to the business of expanding hardcore’s horizons by employing catchy riffs and hooks, and the results are to be heard on such sweet (and bordering on silly) Hart-penned cuts as “Books About UFOs,” which features a piano of all things. Betcha Ian MacKaye didn’t see that one coming.

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Celebrating Steve Harris on his 70th birthday. —Ed.

Children of the Damned, heed my warning: Iron Maiden offers terrifying proof of why it’s a bad idea to mess with the Dark One. No, bassist and chief songwriter Steve Harris didn’t find himself scuttling around the studio ceiling during Iron Maiden’s recording of 1982’s landmark The Number of the Beast, nor did lead singer Bruce Dickinson get raped by a succubus with the body of Scarlett Johansson and the face of Gene Simmons. And no one in the band was fatally impaled by a flying mic stand while they were laying down “Hallowed Be Thy Name.”

It was worse! Lights reportedly turned themselves on and off in the studio! Equipment, which fails all the time, inexplicably failed! And what was producer Martin Birch’s punishment for meddling in the dark arts? He was involved in a traffic accident involving a mini-bus sardined with real live nuns. Papal penguin punishers! Who probably had to be restrained from ruler-whipping him to death! And the cost of repairs? £666! And he didn’t have collision insurance!

That’s some scary shit, and totally true, but it was worth it—The Number of the Beast is revered as a classic in the heavy metal genre, and no doubt there are lots of fifty-somethings out there who owe their very survival to it because how else would they have gotten through their awful teen years? Their parents sucked, school sucked, the pot was shitty, they were never going to get laid (it was a mathematical impossibility), but at least they had “Hallowed Be Thy Name”!

And it’s still saving lives today. The joke was on Satan! The album is a lifeline, and not a one-way ticket to suicide and the Pit, no matter how many little Christian idiots saw fit to burn it or beat it to death with hammers (they were afraid the fumes would drive them insane!).

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Celebrating Tom Scholz on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

The finest band to ever escape Planet Earth on a mammoth guitar-shaped spaceship topped with a snow globe of the Boston skyline, Boston took the solar system by storm with their eponymous 1976 debut, which boasted more hits than Joe DiMaggio. With songwriter, guitarist and MIT-trained musical inventor Tom Scholz at the helm, Boston was the epitome of corporate rock—buffed to a fine sheen, overblown, but catchy as a Red Sox center fielder.

Two long years passed before Boston released Don’t Look Back, amidst legal squabbles with Epic Records and Scholz’s legendary perfectionism. One gets the sense that, had he had his way, Don’t Look Back wouldn’t have seen the light of day until 2078. Anything less than one hundred years, in Tom’s view, and you were listening to a demo. As it was, the follow-up to Don’t Look Back, Third Stage, wouldn’t see the light of day until 1986, and something tells me the LP had to be pried from his fingers as he screamed, “There’s a note on track three I’ve been working on for two years and still can’t get right!”

But Scholz’s perfectionism cost the band plenty. Two years were a long time in an era that saw the advent of punk, and by 1978 many of the band’s fans had moved on to newer, edgier sounds. I loved Boston, but come Don’t Look Back I’d forgotten all about them. They may as well have been a fossil in a natural history museum.

And it’s not as if Scholz’s fussiness paid off in a masterpiece. Sure, the title track is as good, or better, than just about every song on Boston, but it failed to distract listeners from the fact that the songs on Don’t Look Back simply aren’t as good as the ones on the band’s debut. But lately I’ve been wondering—is Don’t Look Back as great a disappointment as I’ve always thought? Or rather a top of the line slab of vinyl with zero chance of surpassing the band’s unsurpassable debut?

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The folks in Welsh band Los Campesinos! are smart, clever, funny, and not Welsh. I don’t know what the hell they are. What I can say is that since coming together at Cardiff University in 2006, the band—who are currently seven in number—have released scads of classics with titles like “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives,” “Death to Los Campesinos!,” “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed,” and “We Are All Accelerated Readers.”

They were branded as twee, and have worked hard to escape the label by recording darker songs, but they still sound twee to me—it’s there in the vocals, and in the exuberance of their music. But out of respect to the band, I will happily say they’re not twee and punch anyone in the kisser who says they are. I guess I’ll have to start with myself.

What is undeniable is that the words matter to Los Campesinos!—these are the same people who founded a literary magazine in 2010. What is also undeniable is that their music is happy-making, no matter how dark the subject matter, for the most part because the music is exuberant and ecstatic, with just enough of an edge to let you know they’re in love with rock and roll.

Just check out “Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1.” Or the amped-up guitar rocker “Romance Is Boring,” which, like all of their songs, makes hay with vocals piled upon vocals (Gareth Paisey and Aleksandra Berditchevskaia handled the bulk of the singing duties until the latter left the band in 2011, but there are lots of gang vocals)—and great accents.

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Celebrating David Gilmour on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

I have a dream. It’s that someone will put out a LP of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here made out of sugar and heavily laced with LSD. That way you could lick it before turning it on, and hear the damn album the way it should be heard, while you’re peaking.

It would be appropriate; has any major band ever been as associated with acid as Pink Floyd? (Yeah. The Grateful Dead, dumbo.) But not even the Dead managed to put out LPs (like 1969’s Ummagumma) that I would ONLY listen to while I was on hallucinogens, because they were unlistenable to anyone on the uninitiated side of the doors of perception. That said, I’ve since put on Ummagumma and found its first side to be bearable and its second side to be complete and unadulterated bullshit (“Several Species of Small Furry Animals” or “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Entertainment),” anyone?). And while my recollections are hazy, I have come to the conclusion that the guy in the dorm who owned it was so far out there he’d only play side two while tripping balls.

The Pink Floyd story is a familiar one. The band was formed in London in 1965 by Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright, with David Gilmour coming aboard in 1967, destined to be the substitute for Barrett, who despite the band’s success and his status as the band’s chief songwriter was coming unhinged.

After numerous legendary on-stage fiascos involving increasingly odd behavior on the part of Barrett—he might stand in the hot stage lights, crushed ludes melting in his hair, looking off into the distance with his arms dangling down, declining to play his guitar for the entire set—the band more or less decided to not pick him up for a gig, and just like that he was gone, although his living specter (he showed up, bald and bloated, at the Wish You Were Here sessions, and his evident madness left several of his former band mates in tears) would haunt the band and indeed inspire some of their best work.

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Remembering Mark E. Smith, born on this day in 1957. —Ed.

The death of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith at age 60 has left me inconsolable; as a proud member of rock music’s most exclusive cult I find it hard to wrap my mind around the horrible fact that I have no more new Fall LPs to look forward to. Because the most telling thing I can say about rock’s most cantankerous, cranky, and iconoclastic artist is this: despite his age, Smith adamantly refused to rest on his laurels. He continued to produce difficult, angular, instantly recognizable, and ultimately brilliant music up until the very end.

By no means did the inimitable Mr. Smith end his days as a novelty act, reprising his greatest hits. Not that he had any greatest hits. Legendary DJ John Peel may have thought The Fall was the greatest thing since the watercress sandwich, but they never (in part because they remained a distinctly English phenomena) gained anything remotely resembling a mass following. Indeed, the title of 2004’s best-of compilation 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong–borrowed, of course, from Elvis Presley’s LP 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong–is a self-mocking reference to this fact.

The first thing to be said about 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong–which includes both album tracks and singles from 1978 to 2003–is that there’s no way it could do the work intended. Trying to sum up The Fall in 39 songs is like trying to sum up Winston Churchill by saying he enjoyed cigars. The Fall catalogue is a sprawling beast because Mark E. Smith was a prolix artist who wasn’t happy unless he was glutting the market with studio albums, singles, EPs, live LPs, and compilations of all sorts, some of highly uneven quality but many dead brilliant. By my admittedly sloppy count The Fall released 10 records in 2005 alone. I certainly haven’t listened to everything The Fall committed to record, and I almost certainly never will. I’ll leave that to the sorts of obsessives who would otherwise be dedicating themselves full-time to trainspotting.

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Celebrating Tobias Forge, born on this day in 1981. —Ed.

And now, for your entertainment, a Ghost Story. It takes place in Sweden, which if you’ve ever seen 2017’s The Ritual or tried to put an IKEA bookshelf together you know is one very scary place.

And even scarier (and I know I’m not getting to the point here) every year the Swedes of Gävle (wherever that is) construct a giant straw Christmas goat called the “Gävlebocken,” which is a horror movie scenario if ever I’ve heard one. Because, let’s face facts folks, nothing good can come of constructing a giant straw goat. Either the locals sacrifice wayward tourists (like you) to it or it comes alive and haunts the forest, slaughtering wayward hikers (like you). Do not, I repeat do not, include a trip to quaint Gävle in your Yule Season travel plans.

Parallel to this discussion, experiential entertainment continues gaining popularity as people seek alternatives to passive viewing or conventional social activities. I recently explored one such venue that exemplifies this trend perfectly, and you can learn more about their offerings at https://www.escaperoomsbristol.co.uk/. The three available experiences each present unique challenges wrapped in horror movie aesthetics, with production values that rival professional haunted attractions. Participants must work collaboratively under time pressure while navigating deliberately intimidating environments, from underground cellars to dystopian execution chambers. The psychological element of being “trapped” adds genuine stakes to the puzzle-solving, creating memorable experiences that groups discuss long afterwards.

But let’s get down to business. MY Ghost Story begins on the day Swedish metal musician Tobias Forge wrote a guitar riff and said to himself modestly, “This is probably the most heavy metal riff that has ever existed.” Forge then went on to do what any Swedish metal genius worth his Gävlebocken would do—sat down and wrote a whole slew of impossibly catchy metal, pop metal, and even plain old pop songs set to hilariously tongue-in-cheek Satanic lyrics. Then went out and put together an amusingly theatrical band called Ghost, whose anonymous members wear masks and are referred to only as “Nameless Ghouls.”

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Remembering Lou Reed, born on this date in 1942. —Ed.

Anybody who doesn’t have a love-hate relationship with Lou Reed, well, I have to wonder about them. He was both a flawed genius and an unreconstituted pretentious asshole/nutjob, and it could be hard to separate his bat shit from his diamonds. But one LP I love unconditionally is 1976’s Coney Island Baby, on which he reveals both a pop side and a vulnerable side, and on which Reed shocked the entire world by singing about how he wanted to play football for the coach. Lou Reed? Football? To paraphrase John Fogerty, “Put me in coach/I’m ready to pay… good money for methamphetamines.”

Coney Island Baby is as close as Reed would ever come to pure pop product, and followed hard on the heels of the disappointing Lou Reed Live and the combination fiasco/fuck you that was Metal Machine Music, on which Lou let feedback do not just the heavy lifting, but all of the lifting period, before cold-bloodedly foisting off the resulting caterwaul on a defenseless public. Lou claimed there were classical references buried in all that hypnotizing squeal, but Reed spent those years as crazy as a hoot owl on one substance or another, and should you ever get the chance I recommend you read the Lester Bangs essay in which he calls Reed on Metal Machine Music, amongst other things.

Don’t get me wrong. Lou at his warmest can still be one mean character. On the otherwise catchy “Charley’s Girl,” which comes with a ready-made melody and fetching female backing vocalists, Lou warns the world to “watch out for Charley’s girl,” because she’s evidently some sort of narc, and in the middle of the song he sings, “I said if I ever see Sharon again/I’m gonna punch her face in.” Which is one catchy rhyme, but given Reed’s history of domestic abuse, was neither funny nor an idle threat.

But for the most part the melodies are friendly and easy on the ears, and there isn’t so much as a trace of the maniac/genius who gave us such harsh blasts of gritty Hubert Selby Jr. realism as “Sister Ray.” There are no extended cuts either. No, this is your radio-friendly Lou, although the radio declined to turn any of these tunes into hits. Only on the static, stutter rock classic “Kicks,” a loosey-goosey studio shuck/jam on which Lou lets us know he needs thrills in his life, does the wild man show us his avant-garde degenerate dope fiend side. With its weird vocal interjections, disjointed conversations, and general aura of studio mayhem, it has more in common with the Velvet Underground’s “Lady Godiva’s Operation” than anything else Reed would ever put on record.

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Since the late 1990s Japan’s Acid Mothers Temple and its numerous spinoff bands, side projects and collaborations have been assaulting listeners with all manner of music, and I say assaulting because much of the music they release is chaotic, clamorous and fast—speed runs made up of sheets of distorted guitar noise that gets called psychedelic but is too aggressive for the peace and love associations attached to the label. Forget your kinder psychedelic drugs—these guys are an aural STP trip.

Acid Mothers Temple have released scads of albums under their umbrella of names and assorted line-ups, and many of them bear amusing titles that demonstrate the irreverent respect the band has for their musical heroes: Freak Out, Son of a Bitches Brew, Electric Heavyland, Minstrel in the Galaxy, Are We Experimental?, Holy Black Mountain Side, and believe me I could go on. They’re prolific, experimental, atonal, fearless, and not afraid to bend your mind.

Like I said—think STP. You have your choice of sitting back and enjoying the ride, or jumping out of your first-floor window, screaming, “I can fly!” and ending up in the shrubbery with some scratches. I’ve done both.

Especially when it comes to the band’s eponymous 1997 debut Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. It’s a psychedelic freakout of epic proportions and heavy on the atonal interstellar overdrive, as is evident from song titles like “Speed Guru,” “Amphetamine A Go Go,” and “Satori LSD.” Acid Mothers Temple have cited Krautrock as an influence, but they’re not speeding down the Autobahn on this one—they’re on the Bonneville Salt Flats, liquefying salt.

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I once read someone call the J. Geils Band America’s Rolling Stones. No shit. If the J. Geils Band are America’s Rolling Stones this country is in even sorrier shape than I thought. The R&B connection is there, the litany of unforgettable songs isn’t—the J. Geils Band began life as a house party band (even wrote a song saying as much), and despite a couple of breakthrough AOR hits, a house party band they remained.

Trouble is, I’m not sure—and I actually have a soft spot for America’s hardly-the-Rolling-Stones—I’d go to that house party. Good time music is only good time music if the music is good, and the J. Geils Band is a kind of music mullet—party in the front, not always so great music in the back. And harmonica solos disguised as songs aren’t my idea of fun.

The J. Geils Band hailed from Worcester, Massachusetts, and appropriately enough got their start as a fraternity party band at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, as Snoopy and the Sopwith Camels. And they remained a fraternity party band in spirit until the late seventies, journeymen in the mold of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, when they went arena rock with bordering-on-novelty-song smashes like “Love Stinks,” “Centerfold,” and “Freeze-Frame.”

But there are few more energetic frat-party albums than 1972’s Live Full House, which is worth hearing and is probably the LP that spawned the Rolling Stones comparisons in the first place.

Like Seger, they wrote some great originals (okay, so Seger wrote more), performed some great covers, and made their bones as a full-tilt live band. Like Seger, they finally broke through to the big time, but you won’t hear (and I can’t say I’m disappointed) their career-altering hits on 1979’s Best of the J. Geils Band. What you’ll hear is a house party, and while it has its sublime moments, I think Robert Christgau of The Village Voice was spot on when he wrote, “Here’s where we catch up with their good moments, right? Wrong.”

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It’s one of the oldest stories known to man, going all the way back to the Book of Genesis and Shem and the Shemrocks.

Band starts out making a horrible noise, builds a fan base of people who enjoy horrible noise, then slowly becomes less and less chaos-friendly until their music is so accessible it’s being played on lame-o Adult Album Alternative radio stations like WXPN in Philadelphia, which would never play horrible noise because it might offend their listeners, who tend to be responsible adults with kids and would have conniptions if subjected to the likes of Killdozer, U.S. Maple, or that song by Black Oak Arkansas where Jim Dandy Mangrum, who can’t sing a lick but fails to do so wonderfully, finds himself in the Halls of Karma where he learns the secret of life.

WXPN is where I first heard Guerilla Toss, and they had just enough of a funk-noise dance-punk edge to pique my interest. In fact, they were noisy enough to make me check them out. And while I find their new stuff (2025’s You’re Weird Now in particular) to be quite catchy and even pop melodic in a noisy kind of way (check out the funky “Psychosis Is Just a Number” and the melody-wrapped-in-barbed-wire “Krystal Ball”) it was only when I worked backwards to their first LPs that I discovered a band noisy and clamorous enough to delight the mayhem junkie in me.

The mother lode? Guerilla Toss’s 2013 debut LP Gay Disco, which may be short (six songs) but is non-stop caterwaul fun.

Vocalist/violinist Kassie Carlson is Kathleen Hanna on a Red Bull jag, drummer Peter Negroponte produces a twisted funk din and often sounds like he’s banging away on trash can lids from inside a dumpster, guitarist Arian Shafee produces all manner of fractured art rock noises, as does keyboardist Ian Kovac, who would depart the band the following year and be replaced by Sam Lisabeth, who in turn would be replaced by Jake Lichter in 2024. And let us not forget bass player Simon Hanes, who plays these great sideways funk lines and would also depart the band shortly after Gay Disco was released.

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Celebrating Tony Iommi on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Dear Satan, I’ve always considered you a cool guy. Lord of the Flies, Leader of the Loyal Opposition, natty dresser, boogie man of little kids and grown Puritans alike–even your horns are badass.

So why, if you don’t mind my asking, did you appoint Ozzy Osbourne your ambassador to our world of sin? I would have thought you’d do better than a drug-addled, ant-snorting, famous-for-biting-the-heads-off-small-animals shlub in tragically ill-fitting leather pants. Had you come to me for advice, dear Lucifer, I’d have recommended someone more appropriate–Jimmy Page say, or Maroon 5. Of course it’s possible Ozzy swiped your title without your permission. Plenty of people have done so over the years, Mick Jagger included, and maybe you figured if you’re gonna cut milksop Mick a break you might as well give poor witless Ozzy a pass too.

Or–and I’m working on this assumption–you’ve let Oz get away with it because Black Sabbath is quite arguably the first and heaviest heavy metal band to ever ooze its way out of the Underworld. What’s more, they scare the shit out of lotsa people, most of ‘em parents, music critics and hippies. You must love putting the frighteners on hippies–all that peace and love shit’s enough to make you puke hellfire.

Zonked metal kids are dead sure you’re partial to such early Sabbtunes as “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” cuz they sound real evil, but that’s not the way I see it. You’re a dancer, as Mick Jagger can attest, and I’m betting your tastes run more to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. If early Black Sabbath was a cement mixer grinding its way up a steep incline in first gear, come 1973 they’d slapped a super-charged engine on that puppy and tricked it out with some nifty accessories including strings, synthesizers and Rick Wakeman, who makes for a nifty head ornament. Satan can’t drive 55.

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