Author Archives: Michael H. Little

The Stray Cats were the Sha Na Na of the MTV era. A rockabilly nostalgia act, and like most nostalgia acts they offered up a tame version of the music produced by the folks they were paying tribute to—Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Burnette—and the list goes on. They carried the torch. But they forget to light the damn thing.

The Stray Cats hued to the original sound, but they were far too polite—the early rockabilly crowd was composed of berserkers, and the Stray Cats were more Apollonian than Dionysian. The early folks were out to burn the cornfield. The Stray Cats were out to pay their respects. They had sound and image down pat but they weren’t into arson.

They left that to rockabilly’s other modern day practitioners—bands like the Cramps, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Hillbilly Hellcats, Flat Duo Jets and Southern Culture on the Skids, to name just a few. Bands that injected their rockabilly with a healthy dose of run-amok dementia. Guitarist and vocalist Brian Setzer had the right haircut and he sure could play, and the same went for drummer Slim Jim Phantom and bassist Lee Rocker. But what I never heard from them was the barbaric yawp that made their models menaces to the social mores of their day. They weren’t dangerous—tribute bands never are.

I’m certainly not the first person to question the Stray Cats’ overly respectful and ultimately weak-kneed take on one of rock’s most primal genres. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke bandied about the word “spiritless,” while Robert Christgau went for the jugular, writing that Seltzer’s “mild vocals just ain’t rockabilly. You know how it is when white boys strive for authenticity—’57 V-8 my ass.” Later he would get even surlier, writing, “Brian Setzer is the snazziest guitarist to mine the style since James Burton. But he’s also a preening panderer, mythologizing his rockin’ ’50s with all the ignorant cynicism of a punk poser. He’s no singer, no actor, no master of persona. And if he can write songs he didn’t bother.” Ouch.

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Remembering Chris Squire, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

I’ve seen all good people turn their heads each day, wondering out loud, “What is that awful sound?” And I have to tell them, “It’s the Yes album spinning on your turntable, dim bulb!”

That’s the intro I intended to use for what I figured would be a disparaging review of 1971’s The Yes Album. I’ve always been a big believer in the motto “Just Say No to Yes,” because the band has all the loathsome characteristics of your average “progressive” rock band. Castrato vocalist, check. Extraordinarily talented musicians who would sooner play some intricately difficult chord progression than just whomp you on the skull like Iggy and the Stooges, ditto. And fiendishly complex songs composed of like 10 intricately interwoven musical themes, present. But a terrible thing happened when I put The Yes Album on my turntable. Much to my surprise and dismay, I discovered I actually kinda like the fucker!

Me! Prog! Impossible! Implausible! Because prog-rock is the exclusive domain of skinny-armed guys (women hate prog, it’s what makes them superior to men) in ill-fitting t-shirts with scruffy beards who spend the bulk of their time tinkering with electrical gadgetry and watching Dr. Who, and who like their rock music in direct proportion to its distance from three-chord rock. They don’t want three chords, they want three hundred! Five hundred! One thousand! One million!

Let’s get one thing straight: when I say I like The Yes Album what I really mean to say is that I like portions of The Yes Album. Because Yes, like many other progressive groups, suffers from a collective form of attention deficit disorder the effect of which is to render them incapable of sticking to one musical idea for very long. No sooner do they fall into a cool groove before they move onto another section that isn’t half as great, and so on. Rare is the song (the two-parter “All Good People” fills the bill) where they open on a beguiling note and stick with it through the entire song.

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The day you wake up and realize you like Rush is the worst day of your life, you look in the mirror and what you see is nauseating. You spend your entire life hating Rush because Rush are deplorable Prog-Libertarian/Objectivist showoffs and then you wake up one infamous morning and have to admit to yourself that you actually like Rush, or a few of their songs which is bad enough, and it’s the end of you, you’re finished, annihilated. I woke up the other day and had to admit to myself that I actually liked Rush, or at least a few of their songs, and what I saw in the mirror was hideous—a morally repugnant Mr. Hyde capable of any infamy. I looked myself in the mirror and I said, “I don’t know who you are or what you want but you’ve ruined my life.”

Fortunately (as I’ve said ad nauseam) I only like three or four of Rush’s songs, but that’s enough to make me a pariah in the circles I run in. And the only reason I like the one closest to my heart (“Closer to the Heart”) is because it’s hilariously, lovably dumb. Still, we’re talking about Rush, the humor-deprived prog-metal power trio that stormed out of the Great White North playing songs of byzantine complexity complete with Ayn Rand-addled lyrics (check out “Trees,” I dare you).

Their steadfast commitment to playing everything in the most technically complex way possible and total dedication to writing twelve-part songs (complete with Roman numerals!) was unforgivably self-indulgent, and I commend them for coming right out and admitting it in the (twelve parts complete with Roman numerals!) opus “La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self Indulgence).” I also commend bassist/keyboardist and lead castrato Geddy Lee for confessing that he had no idea whatsoever what their 1976 concept album 2112 was about. How endearing!

Unlike their more pop-oriented south-of-the-border neighbors in Kansas and Styx, Rush were the real progressive rock deal, which is to say that their commitment to complex song structures requiring Ubermensch chops rendered them pretentious beyond redemption. A definite love ‘em or hate ‘em proposition, Rush. “The most obnoxious band currently making a killing on the zonked teen circuit” wrote hater and Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau of 1977’s A Farewell to Kings.

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Remembering Lou Reed in advance of his birthdate tomorrow —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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This contender for the most disappointing follow-up album ever has caught mucho flak over the years, and for good reason. It’s immensely difficult to imagine how The Rolling Stones could have topped its predecessor, 1972’s Exile on Main Street, easily one of the most brilliant rock LPs of all time. But then again the band had been one-upping themselves every time out since 1968’s Beggars Banquet, and if anyone stood a chance of besting Exile on Main Street it was the Stones.

Needless to say, 1973’s Goats Head Soup is no Exile on Main Street. Again, hardly shocking. The Stones would have had to be able to walk on water to up the ante once again. What is shocking are the precipitous drop-off in song quality and the occasionally rote and desultory performances. Goats Head Soup is not a “not as great as” proposition. Goats Head Soup is a merely good album from a band that could seemingly do no wrong and was at the height of its powers.

Worse, it was the beginning of a prolonged decline, and indeed the band’s death rattle if like me you’ve never warmed up to their “comeback” album, 1978’s Some Girls, or anything that came afterwards for that matter. Mick Jagger said at the time, “It wasn’t as vague as [Exile on Main Street] which kind of went on so long that I didn’t like some of the things. There’s more thought to this one.” “More thought”? No one ever called Mick a deep thinker.

Critical reception was mixed. Some deluded souls said it stood up against Exile on Main Street and 1971’s Sticky Fingers—victims, I suspect, of either wishful thinking or outright denial. Others weren’t so kind. Lester Bangs called it “sad.” Greg Shaw wrote that the album had “no redeeming qualities whatsoever” and then doubled down by writing there was “nothing good” about it.” The word “decadent” got bandied about a lot, and oddly enough—given the Stones’ reputation for excess—it was not meant as a compliment.

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Celebrating Roger Daltrey in advance of his 80th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Many have called The Who’s 1970 Live at Leeds the best live album of all time. Me, I’ve always scoffed. It made no difference that I’d never actually sat down and listened to it. A good rock critic doesn’t have to actually listen to an LP before passing judgment on it. He simply knows, based on gut instinct and certain arcane and occult clues, whether an album is a dud or not. In the case of Live at Leeds, there are three clues to the album being rated far greater than deserved.

The first is the LP’s inclusion of “Summertime Blues,” a song that has always given me hives and put me off my dinner of Hormel’s Chili on hot dogs, which is the impoverished rock critic’s version of pan-fried foie gras with spiced citrus purée. The second is that Live at Leeds suffers—if only in one notable case—from that early seventies affliction, song bloat. You know what I’m talking about: live albums where the bands stretch their songs to extraordinary lengths, in some cases obscene two-sided lengths, forcing the stoned listener to stand up, stagger to the stereo in a Tuinal haze, and turn the damned record over to hear the second side. Finally, there was the issue of song selection: six tunes, three of them covers, with none of the covers being particular favorites of mine. And I’ve never been a big fan of one of the originals, “Magic Bus,” either.

Which has always left me to wonder, “What’s in it for me?” And I’m not alone; in particular, Live at Leeds failed to impress those twin pillars of rock criticism, the generally unintelligible Greil Marcus, who called the music dated and uneventful and the ever-crotchety Robert Christgau, who singled out “Magic Bus” for special abuse, calling it “uncool-at-any-length.”

Besides, I’ve always been more than satisfied with the three Who LPs I consider indispensible, namely Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, Who’s Next, and Quadrophenia. As for the rest of the Who’s catalogue—including Tommy—I had no use for it. But having finally listened to the Live at Leeds, I’m flabbergasted; it may not be, as critic Nik Cohn called it, “the definitive hard-rock holocaust,” but it does rock balls, probably because The Who was the best live band in the world at the time.

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Celebrating Steve Harley on his 73rd birthday. —Ed.

My all-time favorite rude dismissal of second generation (and second tier) English Glam rocker Steve Harley comes from the New Musical Express’ Roy Carr, who wrote, “By the way Steve, when you’re finished with it, David Bowie would like his voice back and Bryan Ferry his vibrato. You can keep the clothes.”

Mean, I know. And not really fair, either; I suspect Carr’s onus was directed as much towards Harley the human being as it was towards Harley the singer. A childhood bout with polio left Harley with a limp, and like Shakespeare’s lame Richard III that limp left him a kind of egomaniacal villain. Harley shared Richard III’s pride and ruthless drive to become King, but unlike the cunning Richard, Harley lacked the guile and cunning to cloak his vainglorious ambitions. To put it bluntly, he invariably came off in interviews as a megalomaniacal twat. And he was a twat to his long-suffering band members as well.

That said, on 1974’s The Psychomodo, Harley’s second (and final) outing with the original members of Cockney Rebel, Harley delivers the glam goods. The man’s hardly a known quality in the States, and more’s the pity, because The Psychomodo is nothing less than a lost glam masterpiece.

The Psychomodo is a surpassingly strange LP. This is primarily due to the fact that Cockney Rebel was a band without a guitarist. Instead, the band’s sound was chiefly dictated by a pair of hyphenates–Jean-Paul Crocker on electric violin and Milton Reames-James on keyboards. Harley’s animus towards the electric guitar is almost hilariously fussy; he didn’t want them around because they made “rude noises.” Perhaps he was confusing them with whoopee cushions.

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New York City was the undisputed epicenter of the disco inferno that engulfed America in the mid-1970s. It was the glitter ball and coke-spoon necklace Capital of the World, and home to such legendary discotheques as Studio 54 (natch), the Copacabana, the Funhouse, and Paradise Garage (one of the Big Apple’s first openly gay nightclubs), just to name the best known. It was where you wanted to be if you wanted to dance and be your hedonistic, do the Hustle, natural born-to-boogie self. Naturally 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, which brought disco to the great unwashed from Harrisburg, PA to Hawthorne, CA, was set there. Tony Manero would have been shit out of luck in Milwaukee.

But South Florida, and particularly the environs of Miami, was a hotbed too. And it wasn’t really late to the party—the artists signed to Harry Stones’ TK Records (and the other labels under his umbrella) created some of the earliest disco out there—George McCrae’s 1974 hit “Rock Your Baby” was just the second no-doubt-about-it disco song to top the pop charts. Other TK Records artists included Foxy, Anita “Ring My Bell” Ward, and Peter “Do You Want to Play Funky with Me” Brown, amongst others. And artists from other labels were also on the scene, including (my personal favorite) Rice and Beans Orchestra, who bequeathed us the unforgettable “The Blue Danube Hustle.”

It may have been Miami—where clubgoers thronged such legendary discos as the Limelight, Scaramouche, Pete and Lenny’s, Honey for the Bears, the Copa, and Casanova’s—that garnered all the attention, but it was in humble Hialeah, some eight miles northwest of the Magic City, where the real magic was being made. Hialeah was home to TK Records, and more importantly to the label’s bread and butter act, KC and the Sunshine Band.

Formed in 1973 by Harry Wayne Casey, a TK Records part-timer and co-writer of McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby,” the soon-to-be disco superstars were first known as KC & The Sunshine Junkanoo Band. (Fortunately that “Junkanoo” soon found its way to the disco junkyard.) Theirs was a funk-based sound, complimented by a full horn section and lots of percussion, and they were dance floor favorites from the beginning.

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Alt-rock megastars Cage the Elephant have won two Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album of the year, and I think I know why: they’re boring. Toothless. Bland. Not out to make any waves. They’re the Whitney Houston of alternative rock, and proof that playing it safe is a sure-fire way to win the hearts and minds of the middle-of-the-road industry types who hand out the big prizes. Phil Collins would be proud.

It wasn’t always thus. Before they settled upon utter vapidity as cunning career strategy Cage the Elephant produced some moderately exciting blues and punk music—the Pixies get cited a lot—but time and craven ambition seem to have sandblasted what rough edges they had right off of them.

Compare their eponymous 2008 debut (and songs like “In One Ear” and “Free Love”) to 2020’s anodyne Social Cues and what you’ll hear is an elephant that decided to cage itself out of fear that running amok might impact sales or, even worse, alienate the music industry insiders who shape posterity. Just take a gander at this year’s slate of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees. Mariah Carey. The Dave Matthews Band. Sade. Lenny Kravitz. Lenny Kravitz!! When it comes to the rock industrial complex, playing it safe is playing it smart. And taking chances is chancy.

If Cage the Elephant’s grand strategy is to be out-tame Tame Impala, I congratulate them on their success. (Perfect name for supergroup: Tame the Elephant.) On the Grammy-winning Social Cues the six-piece (which was a four-piece until 2017) combine anything-but-enthralling dance rhythms (it’s telling that their real drummer does an impressive imitation of a drum machine throughout) with anything-but-enthralling pop/New Wave melodies topped by lead vox Matt Shultz’s mostly pureed vocals and depressingly generic lyrics.

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Remembering Johnny Winter in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

Famed music critic Frank Sinatra once called rock ’n’ roll the “most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” The crooner who liked to eat scrambled eggs off the breasts of prostitutes added it’s the handiwork of “cretinous goons,” and called it a “rancid-smelling aphrodisiac… that fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” Wow! Sounds great! Where do I sign up?

Good thing The Chairman of the Board never (I’m assuming) got a gander at the Winter Brothers, Johnny and Edgar. One look at Edgar Winter on the cover of 1972’s They Only Come Out at Night would have confirmed his every prejudice, and struck him dead with a coronary thrombosis as well. That or he’d have amended his comments to say, “cretinous goons.”

But to hell, says I, with Frank Sinatra. And God bless dem low-down pink-eyed blues. The Winter Brothers have given us so much great music over the years you’d need a fleet of dump trucks to haul it all away. And it hasn’t been all blues by any means. Edgar, an inveterate dabbler, has recorded pop, blues, rock, boogie, jazz-fusion, and whatever the hell you call “Frankenstein,” while Johnny has played his fair share of straight-ahead hard rock.

In any case, I had a heckuva time deciding whether to review They Only Come Out at Night or Johnny’s 1973 classic Still Alive and Well. I finally opted for the latter because (1) Edgar’s a Scientologist, and I’m a bigot and (2) while Edgar boasts one fantastic set of mutton chops, Johnny has better hair. And a less flamboyant taste in neck bling. The choker Edgar sports on They Only Come Out at Night looks like a Versailles chandelier.

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Remembering Walter Becker, born on this day in 1950. —Ed.

The passing of Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker hit me hard; my fond memories of them go all the way back to their debut LP, 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, which an unusually hip (for the tiny Nowhereville I grew up in, at least) high school music teacher used to make us listen to in class. She was doing her best, that intrepid educator, to help us turn on, tune in, and drop out. Or if not to drop out, at least to alert us to the fact that contemporary music didn’t begin and end with Carole King’s Tapestry.

Steely Dan has always had its detractors; I know because I’ve slagged them my own damn self. I love their early work, but rued their slow slide into the smooth jazz precincts of such LPs as 1977’s Aja and 1980’s Gaucho. Was I too hard on Becker and Donald Fagen? In hindsight, yes. “Deacon Blue” may be a bit too Vaseline-based for my tastes but it has its charms—indeed, when it comes to loser anthems, it’s one of the best.

As for those folks who hate Steely Dan altogether, well, I just don’t understand them. Nor do I understand the labels (soft rock? really?) some critics have slapped on the band over the years. (Why, Rob Sheffield went so far as to write off Can’t Buy a Thrill as—alas and alack—“mellow folk rock”!) Sure, Can’t Buy a Thrill makes for relatively mellow listening.

But it’s a smart person’s mellow listen and doesn’t include an ounce of folk. Its songs are complex and its cynical lyrics are the best a good cynicism-breeding Bard College education can buy. And unlike almost any “soft rock” band then in existence, Steely Dan could always be counted on to throw a fiery guitar-fueled spanner (“Reelin’ in the Years”) into the works. Elliott Randall, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and Danny Dias all appear on Can’t Buy a Thrill, and all three are guitar slingers straight off the top shelf.

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Remembering Sonny Bono, born on this day in 1935. —Ed.

They were, during their time, America’s most beloved singing couple. The short one wasn’t much to look at, but, boy, was that Art Garfunkel hot!

No, I’m talking about Salvatore Bono and Cheerily Sarkisian, who started their career together as Caesar and Cleo but won hearts and minds as Sonny and Cher. The duo did it all; put out a lot of great songs, parlayed their musical success into a successful CBS television variety show, even popularized animal skins and knee-high caveman boots.

Many Sonny and Cher best-of compilations muddy the waters by sneaking Cher’s solo hits into the mix, but me, I’m a purist–you might as well slap a couple of Paul McCartney songs onto a John Lennon greatest hits record. Which is why I chose to review 1975’s The Beat Goes On. Except, wait–the great “Laugh at Me” was Sonny’s only solo hit, so what’s it doing here? And if they saw fit to include it, why not also toss in his legendary LSD freak-out ode “Pammie’s on a Bummer”?

The duo will forever be best remembered for “The Beat Goes On” and “I Got You Babe.” The former captured the ebullient spirit of young America every bit as well as Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy)”; the latter’s shared avowal of love so moved the Dictator’s Andy Shernoff and Handsome Dick Manitoba they sang it together on 1975’s Go Girl Crazy. Anybody who hates either song is certifiably insane.

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Uriah Heep played Hobbit rock. The English progressive rock band’s unholy fascination with swords and sorcery, dungeons and dragons, and castles and fair damsels was enough to make you suspect the guys in the band wore sky-blue capes emblazoned with golden stars around the house. And owned extensive codpiece collections.

Depending on your feelings about Merlin-friendly fantasy, their pair of 1972 releases Demons and Wizards and The Magician’s Birthday were either manna from Middle Earth or laugh riots. I fall into the latter camp—I was once coerced into seeing a Lords of the Rings flick at a multiplex theater and spent the totality of its inexcusably protracted running time wishing J.R.R. Tolkien was still amongst the living so I could punch him in the kisser.

But musically Uriah Heep were one of the most palatable of England’s progressive rock bands, precisely because they put the rock, which in their case ventured into the metal realm, first. They were lean and mean and cast a unique spell thanks to Ken Hensley’s hard-charging steed of an organ. Throw in guitarist with mad skills Mick Box and the 43-octave pipes of David Byron, who is admittedly an acquired taste because at any given moment he may screech like a bat out of hell or shriek like a guy who’s balls are being squeezed really hard, and what you had was totally sui generis.

Their 1970 debut was entitled …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble was very ‘eavy indeed. At their best they could melt stone. At their worst they were every bit as insufferably pompous and pretentious as any progrock unit of the time, with the possible exceptions of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Rick Wakeman.

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Celebrating Conor Oberst, born on this day in 1980. —Ed.

You know you’re in trouble when the most uplifting song on an LP is about a fatal airline crash. And yet in the case of the 2005 LP I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Bright Eyes’ front man Conor Oberst somehow makes it work. This album may not be a mood elevator, but it’s lovely from spiritually charged beginning to political end, thanks in part to Oberst’s excellent lyrics and thanks in part to the melodies, doleful as they often are.

Folk influenced, but with touches of musical discord, “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” left me cold at first, with the exception of the airplane crash classic, “At the Bottom of Everything.” But it slowly grew on me, like fuzzy green mold on the animated corpse of Rod Stewart. Oberst may truck in depression, and his idea of a happy song may involve mass death, but he’s not taking life lying down.

On “Ode to Joy” (which borrows, musically, from Beethoven), for instance, he defiantly faces down the darkness at noon, raging against the futility of war to the accompaniment of some cool guitar feedback before tossing in the great lines, “Well I could have been a famous singer/If I had someone else’s voice/But failure’s always sounded better/Let’s fuck it up boys, make some noise!” If all he’d written in his life were those last two lines, I would still love the man.

“We Are Nowhere and It’s Now” boasts a lovely melody and the vocals of Emmylou Harris, dueting with Oberst. Oberst is falling apart, what with the waitress at his favorite bar looking concerned and the drugs he’s taking giving him a “head full of pesticide.” The trumpet is great, the vocals are transcendental, and somebody else’s suffering has never sounded so good.

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Celebrating Peter Gabriel on his 74th birthday. —Ed.

When Peter Gabriel split Genesis to venture out on his own in 1975, his first solo album was 1977’s eponymous Peter Gabriel. In hindsight, he would judge it overproduced. But artists rarely prove the best judges of their own work. Come the end of his life Picasso would say, “What’s with the weird faces? Nobody looks like that.” Or maybe it was me who said that.

Gabriel featured an odd cast of characters. Gabriel brought King Crimson and art rock guitarist Robert Fripp and synthesizer innovator Larry Fast on board, while producer Bob Ezrin—best known for his work with Alice Cooper–lassoed Cooper guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, as well as bass player Tony Levin. Art rock met lowbrow shock metal on Gabriel, and it was Ezrin’s responsibility to make it work.

And he did, for the most part. One of the LP’s songs sounds like it crept in through a studio side door and bribed its way onto the record. But overproduced or not—and I fall into the camp that believes it isn’t—Gabriel is a powerful piece of work, and a move in the right direction by a guy who, come the punk revolution, would later say, “prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete.”

By “prancing” he might have been referring to Jethro Tull, or his band Genesis for that matter. At the close of each show of the live tour promoting 1975’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Gabriel would appear on stage in a ridiculous yellow body sock festooned with buboes that made him look like a day-glo leper. Prancing? More like dada gone horribly, horribly wrong.

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