Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Al McKay on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Of all the things I’ve loved during my tenure on this planet, it’s hard to beat Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White. And not because he’s a musical genius and head honcho of one of the Seventies’ best soul/funk outfits. No, I love him because he’s the guy who sings, “Yowl!” on several occasions on the great “That’s the Way of the World.” They never fail to thrill me, those yowls, not since I was a young sprog and loved the hell out of MFSB’s “T.S.O.P.”

EWF’s songs dominated Top 40 radio when I was young, because unlike Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament/Funkadelic they were unapologetically middle of the road. But that doesn’t mean that their songs weren’t great, just that they were more like the black equivalent of Elton John than, say, Randy Newman. As the critic Robert Christgau noted about one of their prime LPs, “Most of these songs are fun to listen to. But they’re still MOR–the only risk they take is running headlong into somebody coming down the middle of the road in the opposite direction. Like The Carpenters.”

But so what? Earth, Wind & Fire have produced their fair share of timeless songs, and if they’re slick, the slickness works. Under the direction of White, EWF’s drummer, songwriter, and vocalist, the band’s sound was—and still is—an eclectic brew of funk, jazz, gospel, rock, smooth soul, blues, folk, African music, and disco, and what made them particularly remarkable were their group vocals, and especially the vocals of Maurice White and Philip Bailey.

Unrelentingly positive, their songs were a balm for the soul, and I for one think “That’s the Way of the World” is a slice of mystical brilliance and a song for the ages. All of those vocalists throwing in; it’s a sound so soulful I sprout an Afro every time I listen to it. And their horn section, the four-member Phenix Horns, also merits special attention; one listen to the opening of “Shining Star” and you know you’re in the presence of genius.

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Celebrating Mark Eitzel on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

Mark Eitzel, American music’s poet laureate of the alcoholic undertow, has never gotten his props. During his time with his band American Music Club he put out a number of great albums, each one more besotted than the last, and managed to write what I consider the best song (by far!) of the nineties, “Johnny Mathis’ Feet.”

So what if he brutalized me in comments following a review I wrote of a show at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. What really hurt was his saying, “If I’m as down as you say I am – then what gives you the right to kick me?” I wasn’t kicking you, Mark, I love you man—I was just unhappy that you were moving in the direction of stripped down torch songs.

Ah, but that’s bourbon under the bridge. I will always consider Eitzel a genius, what with his way of both bumming you out and making you laugh with his songs about himself and his burned-out friends. He can turn a phrase and has a surgeon’s eye for just where to put the scalpel in, and these gifts are, I think, on best display on 1991’s Everclear.

It led Rolling Stone magazine to declare Eitzel the Songwriter of the Year in 1991, but didn’t up his band’s exposure any; as Eitzel sadly noted later, “The next show there were about 20 people in the audience. And they were army guys and they thought American Music Club were some righteous American freedom-fighting, cool ass Springsteen-influenced Guns N’ Roses kind of guys. And we did not rock.”

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Celebrating Seth Justman on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

A few words on the evolution of this review: I originally intended to write about 1977’s Foghat Live because I consider it the best live album this side of Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1964 Live at the Star Club, Hamburg, which I love even more than Roxy Music’s 1976 Viva! Roxy Music, which is guaranteed to make your ears clasp their tiny little hands and say, “Glam bam thank you ma’am!”

But then my friend Hank Dittmar who has forgotten more about music than I’ll ever know recommended this 1972 live album by the J. Geils Band, whom I saw at Shippensburg College in the late seventies but can’t really remember seeing at Shippensburg College in the late seventies because I was totally blotto on a combination of Wild Turkey and Placidyl, the latter of which I can only describe as an industrial strength memory dissolvent.

So I decided to review “Live Full House and let me tell you I’m glad I did. It ain’t Jerry Lee Lewis and it ain’t Roxy Music but man do the J. Geils Band cook. They mainly stick to the rock and R&B basics but they infuse what are of course a couple of formulas as old as the hills with so much passion you’ll find yourself jumping up and down and screaming along with Peter Wolf who can really shout ‘em out for a white boy. And when he’s not busy emoting, Magic Dick who is my second favorite Dick in rock’n’roll behind Handsome Dick Manitoba, is busy honkadonkin’ up a storm on the old harpoon. Just check out his set piece “Whammer Jammer” if you don’t believe me.

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Celebrating Corky Laing on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Leslie West is a heavy guy. He weighs like 1,000 lbs and plays heavy music and called his band Mountain because mountains are very heavy, and his song “Mississippi Queen” is so heavy it has to be carried from gig to gig in a specially made truck of the sort the U.S. Army uses to transport intercontinental ballistic missiles. And forget about vinyl. Mountain was so heavy they released their 1970 debut on concrete. It weighed 42 pounds and crushed a whole lot of record players.

Lots of folks dismissed Mountain (West on guitar and vocals, Felix Pappalardi on bass and vocals, Corky Laing on drums, and Steve Knight on keyboards) as Long Island’s answer to Cream, and on songs like “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” “For Yasgur’s Farm,” “The Laird,” and “Boys in the Band” the resemblance is striking. But on Climbing! Mountain escapes their Cream fetish to produce songs as humongous as the whale you keep expecting to show up in “Nantucket Sleighride,” except he never does.

Given Mountain’s reputation as the heaviest beast to ever slouch out of Long Island, Climbing! is far more diverse than you’d expect. Sure, you get some nifty Godzilla stomp along the lines of “Mississippi Queen.” But the band also flirts with acid-prog of the sort that won’t wreak havoc on your tweeters, and tosses in a couple of genre-benders that defy all known ethnomusicological definition. In short, Mountain was no one-trick mastodon.

The band’s division of vocal duties further lent diversity to Mountain’s sound. West’s rhino snort contrasts nicely with Pappalardi’s Jack Bruce, and the duo delegates lead vocal chores accordingly–West sings the speaker-busters, Pappalardi the more Cream-influenced tracks.

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Before we get around to talking about the stupid band New Order’s dumb 1982 EP “1981-Factus 8-1982,” please allow me to say that one of the things I force myself to do as a responsible music critic is what I call Prejudice Testing. This entails my listening to the music of a contemptible band or musical artist I’ve loathed for decades without going to the unnecessary effort of actually listening to them.

The completely lame English band New Order is such a band. My reasons for not listening to New Order were two-fold. One, they were, as we all know, just Joy Division without Ian Curtis, and seeing as how Ian Curtis is the only reason I liked Joy Division, why bother listening to the riff-raff behind him?

They were bound to suck, and in my mind, the best thing they could have done after Curtis’ death was give up music and take desk jobs at a travel agency. Two, it was my understanding that New Order specialized in a smarty-pants species of synthesizer-heavy dance music, which has never been my idea of a good time. And they didn’t sound like much fun, which is the only reason I listen to synthesizer-heavy dance music in the first place. Be brainless or go home, that’s always been my philosophy.

In most cases, my Prejudice Testing confirms my long-held and completely ignorant distaste. Nick Cave really is the pompous windbag and Lazarus-voiced poet manque of modern rock; the music of Oingo Boingo is as dumb as its name; and The The are indeed boring boring. And I could go on.

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Waking up one morning and realizing you like Journey is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. I should know—it happened to me. One day, I hated Journey like I’d hated Journey for literally over four decades. So how was it I found myself clutching a copy of the band’s 1978 LP Infinity to my bosom and saying, “I love you, Journey, don’t ever leave me, please somebody kill me”?

It was horrible. Journey represented everything I despised—late-Seventies/early eighties MOR commercial rock I couldn’t even laugh at, the way I could, say, their San Francisco compatriots, Starship. They weren’t the punch line to a joke—they were simply one of those bands whose songs you can’t turn off fast enough when they come on the car radio. And yet here I was, heart in my throat every time I heard “Wheel in the Sky.”

The whole turn of events was a cosmic jest at my expense, and who could be responsible but God himself? If so, this was some Old Testament-level shit. God took everything from Job, but at least he spared the poor fuck the indignity of becoming a Journey fan.

Then I found myself wondering if the cause wasn’t closer to home—literally. Shortly before I woke up a Journey fan, I’d purchased a Journey tour poster as a purely ironic gesture and hung it on my wall. It was for a gig at the Offenbach Stadthalle during their Departure to Europe World Tour ‘80.

It was one confusing name for a tour, but that’s not the point. What I was forced to ask myself was, had that poster cast some kind of sinister voodoo spell on me? Literally infected me with a Journey virus? Had I inexplicably purchased a CURSED JOURNEY POSTER?

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Celebrating Jim Stafford on his 82nd birthday. —Ed.

The list of famous country novelty songs is a long one. There have been hundreds–probably thousands–of them. Just off the top of my head: Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” Loretta Lynn’s “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” Mark Chesnutt’s “Bubba Shot the Jukebox,” and my dad’s all-time favorite (he sang it all the time), Mac Davis’ “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” Any half-decent country fan could reel off dozens more.

But when it comes to country novelty tune artists, Jim Stafford could just be the king. I grew up listening to “Spiders & Snakes,” “Wildwood Weed,” and “I Got Stoned and I Missed It,” and while I’d never kissed a girl or smoked a joint in my life, I loved the obvious spirit of fun behind all of ‘em.

Stafford has released only three albums, and since 1990 he’s dedicated his energy to operating and performing at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri (no vanity there, and by the way: should you find yourself in Branson, be sure to stop by Dolly Partons’ Stampede!). Don’t know if he’s plain lazy or doesn’t need the money, but Stafford hasn’t released an LP since 1993. (He has done some acting; he played the role of Buford in 1984’s immortal Bloodsucker from Outer Space.)

Jim Stafford spawned four Top 40 hits, and if there’s one word to describe the LP it’s versatility. You get some swamp rock, a faux-lounge number, a couple of good ole’ country numbers, a blues parody, a rockabilly pastiche, and a couple of songs that pack what can only be described as a hard rock punch. And that “variety” also extends to Stafford’s knack for creating personae; he’s a shapeshifter who is, by turn, a sly hayseed, an aging rockabilly fan, a very confused courter, a Louisiana oracle, and so on.

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Nasty, brutish, and short—the ever chipper Thomas Hobbes could have been talking about New York City’s late Seventies/early eighties No Wave scene. He might have said “blessedly short,” because let’s face it, how much horrible noise (the phrase that Lester Bangs used to describe such short-lived No Wave bands like DNA, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) can anyone take?

No Wave was a scene that destroyed itself.

And luckily, the whole No Wave thing was largely (thanks to a military quarantine) confined to Downtown Manhattan, although I’ve heard scary rumors that outbreaks also occurred in Chicago (figures) and Japan (of course).

No Wave was all about making a dissonant, atonal racket, and some of it was produced by people who didn’t know how to play chords on their guitars, and what’s more, they thought chords sucked. Oh, and they liked to scream a lot. Much of it is funny, either on purpose or by accident, which is the only thing that attracts me to it. I like noise, but I like songs too, and good lyrics. No Wave was also (in most cases) about forming and breaking up in a real hurry, and not leaving much of a recorded legacy. The most important recording of the short-lived scene was the 1978 compilation No New York, “curated” by some producer named Brian Eno.

Deliberately primitive and defiantly nihilistic, No Wave was, but some of its bands were more listenable than others—James Chance and the Contortions weren’t exactly easy listening, but they played recognizable songs that fused free jazz and James Brown. And Glenn Branca’s Theoretical Girls don’t sound No Wave to me at all—sure, there’s a lot of dissonance and frayed nerves, but they played songs, cool songs with cool drones and lots of pounding drums. At times (listen to “Mom & Dad”), they sound like a wonderful fusion of garage rock and the early Talking Heads.

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Celebrating Wayne Coyne on his 65th birthday. —Ed.

Attention psychonauts! We interrupt your lysergic day trip across the fifth dimension to announce that the musical programme has been changed. Instead of The Beatles’ 1967 LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—which depending on your point of view is either thee ultimate psychedelic masterpiece or a middling work chiefly distinguished by its revolutionary recording techniques, which in effect turned the studio into a de facto fifth Beatle—you’ll be hearing 2014’s With a Little Help from My Fwends, The Flaming Lips’ track-by-track re-imagining of The Beatles LP. As a result, you can expect significant turbulence, fuzz, distortion, dissonance, noise, and oh yeah, Miley Cyrus, along with numerous other fwends of the band. In short, fasten your seat belts because there are interstellar speed bumps ahead, and hallucinations in your rear view mirror will be closer than they appear.

You have to admire the Flaming Lips’ pluck. Wayne Coyne and the boys might have thrown us a dayglo marshmallow along the lines of 1999’s easy-on-the-ears The Soft Bulletin. Instead they came through with a nerve-jarring and challenging aural experience that harkens back to their Oklahoma days of unconscious screaming. The LP is enormous fun, but not for the faint of ear, and I have no doubt there are Beatles fans who find it nothing short of an act of desecration. The Flaming Lips—and their bwesties—gleefully fold, spindle and mutilate The Beatles’ classic, but their version has moments galore of beauty and wonder—they’re simply buried in a lot of white noise. Can cacophony be lovely? With a Little Help from My Fwends answers the question in the affirmative.

With a Little Help from My Fwends is a better adaptation than The Flaming Lips’ 2009 reworking of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which is a mite surprising given that the Lips’ views on existence have always been surprisingly… dark. Death has always been a preoccupation—from their early days through “Do You Realize” on 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and songs like “Evil Will Prevail,” “Charles Manson Blues,” and “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain” (with its lines “My hands are in the air/And that’s where they always are/You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t/Five stop mother superior rain”) don’t exactly reflect the sunny surrealism of their live shows.

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Celebrating Blixa Bargeld on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

At long last, a rock album capable of shattering my nerves. I’ve sat through all manner of horrible noise for decades, but the sheet-metalheads and industrial music pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten are the first to make me wish I was deaf.

Einstürzende Neubauten may translate as Collapsing New Buildings to English speakers, but they don’t sound like an architectural disaster to me. They sound like the foundry where I worked during my summer years at college only worse, because Einstürzende Neubauten are both foundry and insane asylum, and the lunatics have taken over the machinery.

Is Einstürzende Neubauten’s Industrial Revolution clang and clamor a negative commentary on the robotic dehumanization celebrated by the futurists in Kraftwerk? A conservative retreat to the glory days of steam power, when manly men forged manly things with their manly calloused hands? The final revenge of metal shop kids over the pencil-neck geeks destined for lucrative jobs in the towering high-rises of the private sector? All are questions worth pondering, but having just listened to Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1981 debut Kollaps, I have too much of a headache to think clearly.

Theirs is, I must admit, a novel concept–establish rhythmic din by means of building tools, scrap metal and sundry other detritus of the machine age, then set Blixa Bargeld to the task of barking, growling, muttering, moaning, shrieking, bellowing and ululating all over them. It works wonders, that is if your idea of a good time is having ground augers shoved in your ears whilst being beaten over the skull with a 2-1/2 inch split head hammer.

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Remembering Bobby Weir. —Ed.

Well I’ll be damned. I didn’t think Bob Weir, the eternal boy howdy of the Grateful Dead, had it in him. After decades of coasting—his last great solo offering, 1972’s Ace, was released a shocking 44 years ago—here comes Weir, looking as weather worn as Grizzly Adams in his white beard, or like the great D.B. Cooper finally emerging from the Washington state wilderness, with an album that is not just good, but downright excellent. It just goes to show you—never count a fellow out until he’s six feet underground, and for at least three days at that.

2016’s Blue Mountain is an album of “cowboy songs,” according to Weir’s collaborator Josh Ritter, and was inspired, according to Weir, by his days as a 15-year-old ranch hand in Wyoming. But this is not a collection of other people’s music; Weir had a hand in writing the music for every song, while Ritter both contributed to the music and penned the better part of the lyrics. And so far as the descriptions of it as “campfire music” go I disagree; many of these songs are far too lush and musically sophisticated to cook weenies on a stick to.

But two things they are for sure: beautiful and thoughtful. They demonstrate that the eternal Peter Pan of the Dead has finally grown up and gotten wise, and has honed his songwriting skills in the process. Compared to his previous solo outing, 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool, which utilized lots of studio hacks and frankly sucked like an industrial vacuum cleaner, Blue Mountain is a cool breath of fresh Wyoming air.

Blue Mountain is the work of a man who has finally come face to face with his own mortality, as Weir demonstrates on the elegiac and lovely album closer “One More River to Cross,” in which he acknowledges he’s tired but nearing that final home in the bye-and-bye. And the very rhythmic “Lay My Lily Down” is an unreconstructed death ballad complete with rattling chains, and has Weir singing, “Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow/Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground/Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow/To lay my Lily down.”

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Is this it? Really? This is the album that put The Strokes on the covers of god knows how many magazines, the album that put New York City back on the rock and roll map, the album that came in very close to the top of many magazines’ lists of the best albums of the first decade of the New Millennium? The album that changed the Free World?

Gimme a fuckin’ break.

I get the hype. I do. Good-looking lads from New York City, perhaps the world’s consummate rock and roll town, making said consummate rock and roll town relevant again after how long? New York City was dead, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls and Patti Smith and every goddamn band that made CBGBs famous and every goddamn band to come along after that (No Wave, ho hum) were ancient history, and please don’t toss off the names Lou Reed or David Byrne or Sonic Youth because they’re weren’t artists, they were curated cultural sacred cows and zombified sacred cows at that.

But these were the guys who gave the entire goddamn city mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? God help us all. Manhattan must have been even deader than I thought.

Because I’ve listened to the title track and opener of The Strokes’ 2001 debut LP Is This It more times than I can count, trying to discern exactly what it is that makes The Strokes a great rock and roll band, and I can’t get past the one-minute mark without falling into a coma. It’s a sing-song house-trained punk rock snooze.

But the band’s look and the hype and the rock journalists falling over one another to feature the band first, all of it reached a cultural boiling point, and The Strokes went off like a fireworks extravaganza over the Statue of Goddamn Liberty.

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Remembering Elvis Presley, born on this date in 1935. —Ed.

1974’s Having Fun with Elvis on Stage is my favorite album by the King. On this bizarre throwaway you get snippets of Presley goofing off, having fun, cracking wise, spouting complete gibberish, and generally behaving like Robin Williams in full-blown manic mode before live audiences, quite possibly while stoned out of his legendary pompadour on serious narcotics. There are no songs. No signs of the Elvis who could deliver the goods on stage long after he ceased to produce great albums. This is Elvis unleashed, free to be his absurdist self, and the results are both surpassingly strange and weirdly touching.

As you’d expect this LP of often surreal stage banter—which is universally acknowledged as Elvis’ worst—has a dizzying and disjointed feel; you go abruptly from one monologue or audience interaction to another, without segues or warning. Having Fun with Elvis on Stage was a shameless money-grubbing ploy by Elvis’ rapacious manager Colonel Tom Parker, whose intention it was to milk his cash cow for every shekel he could get. But to anyone interested in treating Elvis as psychological study, it’s a goldmine.

It helps that Elvis has an adoring audience. He was the King, for God’s sake, and if he wants to act the role of his own court jester that’s just fine with the faithful who’d stuck with him through albums like 1963’s It Happened at the World’s Fair and 1965’s Harum Scarum. To call his fans undiscriminating is a massive understatement—they’d have no doubt made a gold record of Elvis Reads Excerpts from Mein Kampf. I’m sure some of the audience’s laughter on the album was of the nervous sort; those closest to the stage must have looked into his pinwheel eyes as he went full Andy Kaufman and realized the man was either on some very strong medicine or an off-the-charts lunatic, or both.

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Remembering Malcolm Young, born on this date in 1953. —Ed.

I can imagine a planet whose inhabitants listen only to AC/DC. The same cannot be said for Television, Iggy Pop, Harry Chapin, The Cars, Canned Heat, The Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, The Swans, T. Rex, U2, The Indigo Girls, The Supremes, The Clash, Joan Jett, The White Stripes, Wilco, Green Day, Jethro Tull, or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I can imagine a planet whose inhabitants listen only to Barry Manilow, but I don’t want to.

Aussie brutalists with filthy minds and even filthier riffs, AC/DC only knew how to do one thing, and they did it with puritanical austerity; they make the Ramones sound positively baroque. When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, and like any simple (but anything but dumb) tool AC/DC knew their function—during their tenure on this planet they kept it missionary position simple, pounding out primal riff after primal riff, album after album, year after year, decade after decade, with nary a synthesizer, ballad (power or otherwise), concept album, string section, or abortive disco move to sully their bad reputation (although they used bagpipes once!).

They kept things as basic as an electric chair, and theirs has been the preferred method of execution for generations of metalheads savvy enough to understand that songs with more than three chords in them (are you paying attention, Rush and Metallica?) are wastes of perfectly good chords. The things don’t grow on trees, you know. There are only 4,083 of them, and if you play them all music’s finished! AC/DC were musical conservationists, and one rock’s biggest contributors to the Save the Chords Foundation.

Only one thing changed in AC/DC’s long, drunken tour bus ride on the highway to hell’s bells. I’m talking, of course, about Bon Scott’s booze-related death on February 19, 1980. Scott was the personification of rock ’n’ roll—no matter what he was singing about it came out sounding like a dirty joke, and you got the idea he had to have his tonsils into the car mechanic’s every six weeks to have them degreased.

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Celebrating Chris Stein on his 76th birthday. —Ed.

A bit of history: When Blondie signed on with Australian producer Mike Chapman (of Chapman and Nicky Chinn glam rock fame) to record their 1978 breakthrough LP Parallel Lines, little did they know what they were in for. Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, and the rest of the band had a rather punk attitude towards the studio, and everything else for that matter; as Chapman noted later, “They were really, really juvenile in their approach to life—a classic New York underground rock band—and they didn’t give a fuck about anything. They just wanted to have fun and they didn’t want to work too hard getting it.”

Chapman the perfectionist called Blondie “hopelessly horrible” and explained his attitude towards the sessions in frankly dictatorial terms: “I basically went in there like Adolf Hitler and said, ‘You are going to make a great record, and that means you are going to start playing better.’” And they did. The result was a landmark record that everybody should own but you know what? I really kind of miss the hopelessly horrible band that gave us Parallel Lines’ predecessor, Plastic Letters.

Sure, Plastic Letters lacks the gloss of Parallel Lines’ disco-inflected “Heart of Glass” and a song quite as catchy as “Hanging on the Telephone,” but it possesses the same gritty and off-kilter NYC charm as the first recordings by the Dictators and the Ramones. Spies, strange happenings in the Bermuda Triangle, and cheating at poker by means of telepathy—Plastic Letters may be an imperfect recording, but boring it ain’t.

That said, Parallel Lines is still loads of fun, and retains that good old punk spirit on such numbers as “Hanging on the Telephone” (love Harry’s New Yawk squawk), “One Way or Another” (great chainsaw riff meets manhunt disguised as love song), and the belligerent closing track, “Just Go Away,” which boasts wonderful shouted backing vocals and really snotty vocals by Harry. And then there’s the pneumatic “I Know But I Don’t Know,” which features some great vocals by an unnamed member of the band, who accompanies Harry and sounds about as New York, New York as they come.

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