The best album of the punk era. It’s not really punk, it’s Eddie Cochran 1976. (GM)
Category Archives: albums
Essential Remnants: #49. Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure
Art-rock is mostly a joke, but when it really rocks and it’s really art that’s a different story. (GM)
Essential Remnants: #50. Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?
I like the songs on this one. He made plenty of great music, but I think within this structure his leaps feel newest and largest. (PK)
We Made A List.
It was my idea. I thought it would be fun for each of us to make a list of what we thought the essential albums of rock were, then compare them and make an Essential Top 50 Rock Albums. My idea, the way I explained it to the lads, was that if Mork were to land on our doorstep, these are the albums we would use to explain rock and roll to him. Then we would create Amazon links and make a minuscule amount of money when people bought them.
The methodology was jury rigged. Each of the five of us made a Top 50. Some of us ranked them, some did not. Some of us limited our lists to only one album per artist, to give Mork a broader range of musics, while others felt free to list five or six albums by favorites like the Beatles and the Hellacopters because these are among the best albums of all time. Most of us seemed to enjoy the experience. One of us railed about the stupidity and un-rock and rollness of commonality. He was certainly right about that.
But I think the list we came up with together demonstrates the power of the classic music, and also the veins of taste and enthusiasm that course out of it. In any case, if you’re from Mars and want to know what rock and roll music to listen to, this is a good place to start. But first, before we start, here are the six albums that got votes in the final round, but didn’t make the Top 50.
We’ll be counting down the Top 50 over the next two weeks or so, right here. Feel free to comment.
56. The Crystals, Best of the Crystals
Listening to this set, I find myself trying to argue that this is the greatest rock music ever created. (PK)
55. Kanye West, The College Dropout
The world’s biggest asshole isn’t the story. He didn’t start out that way. This incredible music made him famous, and was just the beginning of an amazing run of innovative and challenging popular music that rocks. (PK)
54. Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
All songs so well written, and then so wonderfully delivered by Lucinda. (LM)
53. Devo, Q:Are We Not Men?
A bunch of geniuses far ahead of their time. Often wrongly dismissed as a joke. (SM)
52. The Beatles, For Sale
I forgot this one. It’s the best of all. They rocked. (GM)
51. The Pillows, Happy Bivouac
Nirvana meets the Beatles and the Pixies at the Ramones’ house. You know who you are. (GM)
Jefferson Airplane: THE Best San Francisco Band
I guess the news of ex-Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna drummer and percussionist Joey Covington’s passing earlier this week sort of pushed the thoughts I have always had about the Airplane into this virtual-osity.
I think of all the San Francisco bands–especially those who bore the “psychedelic” moniker–the Airplane were the truest to the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.
True, The Dead were a great band,but they were a jam band. Big Brother was a great band, but they were a blues band. Quicksilver and Country Joe and the Fish were great bands, but they were indeed psychedelic,though the Fish gravitated more towards jug band music, and Quicksilver the blues.
However, though the Airplane could indeed be classified as a psychedelic band, they embraced what I think is the essence of real rock ‘n’ roll, and that is attitude.
It was the Airplane, who with White Rabbit encouraged us to “feed our head” as part of what I consider a favorite all time album of mine, Surrealistic Pillow.
That disc followed Takes Off, which featured the band’s first drummer, Skip Spence, who then fled to Moby Grape (another great, albeit tragic band), and female lead singer, Signe Anderson. One the heels of Pillow came After Bathing at Baxter’s and then the wonderful Crown of Creation, but it was album #5, Volunteers, that really sealed the deal of the Airplane owning the the title of best band of their generation. That is because very few albums until then were as in your face as was Volunteers.
Aside from the faux salutes and homage/parodies to Old Glory all over the liner notes and inserts, the opening track , We Can Be Together, announced that as “outlaws in the eyes of America,” we would “cheat lie forge fuck hide and deal.” Equally menacing, the song then screams “Up against the wall, Up against the wall, motherfucker.”
The Farm implies the pastoral life romanticized by Flower Power is the way to go, and the beautiful pairing of the post-apocalyptic Wooden Ships (co-penned by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kanter) and Kantner’s adaptation of the lovely Good Shepherd, with the haunting guitar of Jorma Kaukonen might be demure compared to the fuck you of Together, but they never-the-less indicate there is a different path out there and we are on it, like it or not.
There is also the symmetry of the title track and closing cut, that screams “Look what’s happening out in the streets, got a revolution, got to revolution,” riffing off the Goodwill-like spiritual renewal organization Volunteers of America, shouting out just that: We are volunteers of America.
And, though spiritual renewal may indeed be what author Kantner was pointing to, it was certainly not a Salvation Army style one.
There are other parts of the album, like the half sides of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich–something so American–on either sides of the inside of the album, so that when closed, there was indeed a complete sandwich, albeit in just two dimensions.
Finally, there is the newsletter from the Paz Chin In, a Woodstock take off, that in the text gives us the lyrics (it was still the 60’s, so fuck is replaced by the word “fred”) plus cartoons, baseball stats (with a great subtle homage to local hero and SF Giant, Willie Mays), a goofy crossword puzzle with no questions but cryptic squares, and a funny reminder that says, “Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon.” However, the first is crossed out, and replaced with the word “last,’ and at the time it was true, that Armstrong was first and last.
We are also reminded in the notes to “feed and water our flag,” among other suggestions
In my mind, there is no other statement by any band in the counter culture that ever embraced art and music and sentiments in such a fashion. Within Volunteers, Jefferson Airplane pushed the agenda of “we are forces of chaos and anarchy,” sneering at the status quo while also supplying a deadly combination of cuts in here-to-fore uncharted territory. In fact, nothing else was even close.
Of course the band did rankle in other ways. Like Grace Slick trying to get into the White House to then first daughter Tricia Nixon’s tea for Finch College graduates. Slick, as alumnae, was invited, and did try to attend. However, the singer was not allowed entrance. According to Slick, she and her date, Yippie Abbie Hoffman, were pulled out of the entrance line and denied because they were on the FBI watch list at the time.
Per Slick, all the Airplane were on the list for “suspect lyrics.” Also per Slick, she did try to sneak LSD in to slip Nixon the father–hardly beloved by the left at the time–a mickey (presumably in his cottage cheese and ketchup).
Jefferson Airplane did release a few more discs after Volunteers–Bark and Long John Silver–but they never had the bite of Volunteers. The band did release a terrific live disc, Bless it’s Pointed Little Head that captures everything that is Airplane, and features a brilliant cover of Fred Neil’s The Other Side of this Life, which opens with a Jack Cassady bass-line, that is then joined by some deadly interplay by Kaukonen, then Dryden, and the best of the band systematically joining in.
If the Airplane peaked with Volunteers, they then slowly landed, re-emerging as Jefferson Starship, which was a Kantner/Slick/Balin endeavor to start, but quickly the principles abandoned ship, and the group morphed into the Starship, which really had nothing to do with anything Jefferson at all.
However, Kaukonen, Cassady, and the late Covington did form their own spin-off, Hot Tuna who did stay true to the folk-blues roots that signaled a lot of the original band’s sound in the first place.
Certainly, the Airplane, and especially the then exotic and brainy Slick, with the powerful voice, generated a lot of buzz when they entered the eye of the public at large, but to me at the time it all seemed in the context of the media trying to be or act hip. And, though Slick was indeed a great character, the real story was what a killer band the Airplane really was.
More to the point, they were a great band that embraced the “fuck all of you in the mainstream” principles that are the essence of rock ‘n’ roll.
Bang Bang. Maxwell’s Is Nearly Dead.
There are bars with music and there are legendary bars with music. Maxwell’s, in Hoboken NJ, will be one of the legendary ones for just another two months. I lived in Hoboken in 1981, when Maxwell’s, just three years old, wasn’t yet venerated. At that time it was too new and too exciting, regularly booking the same bands that were playing CBGB, across the river, and serving as something of a home club for Yo La Tengo and the Feelies, among others. During my Hoboken days I remember going to see bands at Maxwell’s, drinking beer at Maxwell’s, having brunch at Maxwell’s, but I don’t remember at this point what bands I saw at that point. At that point the point wasn’t the names, but the music, which was still lively and energized by punk, hugely broadly do it yourself, full of folks making their own legends (and sometimes succeeding) making rock or what became known as Alt-Country, in a movement that changed the tastes of the nation.
The first show that I remember going to see at Maxwell’s by design involved commuting across the Hudson River via the PATH train to see the legendary British punk band the Mekons, whose amazing country record (and that does not do it justice) was called Fear and Whiskey in the UK and had just been released in the US (with some extra tracks) as Original Sin. The room with the music at Maxwells was small then (and is still the same small), an irregular box with a myriad of obtuse and acute angles on the perimeter, plus columns in the middle, kind of the shape of a game controller, only you’re on the inside. There were some chairs and boxes for sitting around the edges, a bar in the back, and the band was crammed into a nook at the other end of this rhomboid box, crushed amidst whatever speakers and amplifiers were stacked up there to help them make noise. The Mekons that night had at least seven people jammed on the stage, and it seemed like 20, playing the usual guitar, bass and drums, with Sally Timms on vocals, and also a fiddle player and an accordion player and a few others who banged on things this and that and who sang along, too, at the sing-songy parts.
The room was packed with expectation on June 20, 1986. The Mekons had always been a political band, but arch, funny, engaged, enraged, also aware they they were playing music ferchrissakes. Their first single, released at the height of punk mania, was called “Never Been in a Riot.” Unlike the Clash.
Their music in 1977 was brittle, angular, clangy, totally amateur. They couldn’t play. A legend arose that if you learned to play your instrument the Mekons kicked you out. The Mekons were masters of the ethos of the naif, the beginner, but over the years their chops improved and their ambitions grew. Jon Langford developed as a guitarist and songwriter. He fell in love with Hank Williams and he steered the band toward the fabulous hybrid they developed in Fear and Whiskey. It’s country, but not afraid of reggae and afropop, in places, homespun but raging with anger about the injustices of the Reagan/Thatcher years and the darkness at the heart of the soul. And that isn’t the half of it. Love songs, sex songs, passion, history, politics, metaphor, but most of all joyous strange music that often sounded trad., music from the ages, but was played by a big rock ensemble with passion and craft. It was was wholly original, like nothing exactly you’ve ever heard before, but full of the spirit that courses through your soul, maybe like marrow. At least on your good days.
This was quite suddenly a band at the top of their game, at the top of anyone’s game, Fear and Whiskey representing the first of a string of maybe five albums (Fear and Whiskey, The Edge of the World, The Mekons Honky Tonkin’, So Good It Hurts, Rock and Roll) that are as first rate as any such sequence in rock history. This was a band for whom the motives seemed to be purely moral, large of heart, full of sensual pleasures that come from making great rocking music with your friends. That sweaty woozy hot night at Maxwell’s I had the unalloyed joy of being in a packed room full of people who were becoming members of the band that was up on stage, the audience pushing them hard, the band embracing their fans and embracing the push, and making music back at us! Encouraging us! By the end we felt like we’d been invited onto the tour bus for the rest of our lives, and while we get off here and there, the many times I’ve seen the Mekons live since, as soon as the band comes on stage, it’s like you’ve never really been away. We’re all serious friends, here to laugh and to grouse together. Together.
Maxwell’s owner announced this week that the club was closing. In this obit in the New York Times owner, Todd Abrahmson, said that they could probably make the business work for another year or two, but that the changes in Hoboken’s demographics make the club’s demise inevitable. “If you think of Willie Mays playing outfield for the New York Mets — I didn’t want us to wind up like that,” he said.
Abrahamson now books the Bell House in Brooklyn, which happens to be on my street, a few blocks down the hill in Park Slope, and where I saw the Mekons play last year. Somewhere I have a file with a recording of that show, but what I was really excited to find was a recording of that show at Maxwell’s back in 1986 at archive.org. Not like being there, but a swell souvenir and not a waste of your time.
The Next New Beatles Album: “What is Life”
By Michael Salfino
The Beatles are that rare group whose epic popularity is matched by the almost unreal quality of their artistic output. They broke up with these creative powers still intact.
But how long could they have continued to function artistically as the greatest band in the world? Here, we imagine (to borrow a word) the next Beatles album that never was.
There are rules by which we must abide. Everything had to be recorded by January 1971. Despite George Harrison’s rising stature as at least Lennon and McCartney’s equal at that time, we can only put two Harrison songs on the album as was the group’s long-standing agreement. We do not get the benefit of having some of the weaker material transformed by the group environment. Think of “Come Together” without the menacing groove of McCartney’s bass riff, and that was despite Lennon essentially barring McCartney from any collaboration. After a lot of thought, here are the results. We’ll call it “What is Life,” which seems an album title all the Beatles could have agreed to. And it’s another concession to Harrison’s growing creative status. (Click the tracks to hear the songs.)
Side 1, Track 1: It Don’t Come Easy. We’re cheating already. While credited to Starr, this is clearly a Harrison track. But Harrison ended up giving all the songwriting credit to Starr in reality so why wouldn’t he have done that here? Starr kicking off an album would have shocked the world, too. As would the quality of this song as opposed to his prior, mostly jokey Beatles efforts. Recorded February 1970. Highest chart position: No. 4.
Side 1, Track 2: Another Day. Written and previewed for the Let it Be sessions. Lennon would have resisted, in all likelihood. He famously blasted it in “How Do You Sleep” (“The only thing you done was Yesterday, and since you’ve gone you’re just Another Day”). But Lennon lost all these battles before (Ob La Di, Ob La Da; Maxwell’s Silver Hammer), and this song is far superior to both of them — even Lennon would have admitted that. Recorded January 1971. Highest chart position: No. 5.
Side 1, Track 3: Instant Karma. Sort of a follow-up to All You Need is Love, which has the same chord progression. The ‘50s studio sound would have stood in stark contrast to the first two tracks. Peaked at No. 3 on the charts. It’s smart and cynical, yet somehow anthemic. Recorded January 1970.
Side 1, Track 4: Junk. The Beatles passed over this song twice, once on The Beatles (The White Album) and then on Abbey Road. It’s a perfect, earthy and plaintive response to Instant Karma’s broad call for man to take responsibility for his fate. McCartney seems to be saying that our objects have meaning in the memories they’re a part of, yet we’re constantly seeking to replace them and with it, unknowingly, a piece of ourselves. Released April 1970.
Side 1, Track 5: Remember. Continuing on the idea of nostalgia, which literally translates into “the painful desire to return home.” But then at the end, Lennon literally blows up the past, so it’s unclear if he wants us to find peace in our childhood memories or whether the dreams we had and that others had for us are a weight that we must release. The staccato rhythm is like a clock ticking, relentlessly. Recorded October 1970.
Side 1, Track 6: What is Life. Despite peaking at just No. 10, this is exactly the kind of song you imagine when someone talks about a hit record. So simple yet uplifting and life affirming. Musically, it stands as an enduring testament to the Phil Spector Wall of Sound. It’s also the greatest riff Harrison ever wrote and arguably one of the best in rock history.
Side 2, Track 1: Maybe I’m Amazed.
Side 2, Track 2: Wah-Wah. Very non-Beatlesesque in how it’s about to fall apart at any moment, with the horns and guitar overdubs too numerous to count. There’s a thrill in hearing a song like this. It’s at the core of the Rolling Stones appeal, for example. Another classic Harrison riff, with another assist from Clapton. The lyric is a snipe at some of the petty business disputes that ripped the band apart (or were threatening to, in this alternate reality). Recorded Summer 1970.
Side 2, Track 3: Mother. Raw and aching. A primal scream for relief from childhood pain that never leaves us. It was somehow released as a single and actually peaked at No. 43, as a nearly four-minute festering wound. This song highlights Lennon’s amazing vocal ability. The two most underrated things about the Beatles are Lennon’s singing and McCartney’s bass playing. And Harrison, always Harrison. Recorded September 1970.
Side 2, Track 4: That Would be Something. Harriso
Side 2, Track 5: Working Class Hero. I wrote the lyrics to this song as my essay in business class when I was a senior in high school and got an A. What can you say? Lennon, post-therapy and post-drug addiction, was peaking again after a pretty quiet year (for him). This was really his last great run of songs. Recorded Fall 1970.
Side 2, Track 6: Teddy Boy. A Beatles attempt is on Anthology. In the context of this album, it’s a perfect response to Mother. Putting them right after one another is perhaps too obvious. This is C-plus McCartney material, but it’s still McCartney. Recorded originally in 1969 with the Beatles.
Side 2, Track 7: God. “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” Talk about getting in the last word. He’ll say it again, too, in case you missed it the first time. If this is the last Beatles album, its ending is as poignant as The End: “And so dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on. The dream is over.” But there’s also the uplifting call to believe in yourself and in the love you’ve made. Another epic Lennon vocal, too.
Album grade: Are you kidding me? Five stars, easily.
The 20 Greatest Albums Of All-Time According To Me, Described In 20 Words Or Less
By Steve Moyer
I’ve decided that the best testament I can give to my existence is to review my entire music collection (including these), because I have been absolutely intimate with the good stuff, not like some music critic dude who listens once and writes. I will do this little by little. So here’s the teaser. Obviously, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the albums that are “supposed to be” in everyone’s top 20 (not that I don’t like some of those, they’re just not in my top 20). Oh well. These are what I’m taking to the desert island.
If you’re interested in checking this stuff out, PLEASE don’t download, or worse yet, youtube one song and then pass judgment. Buy the whole thing, preferably a bricks and mortar version. Listen to it at least five times, in its entirety. Look at the pictures. Read the liner notes. That’s how albums are meant to be enjoyed. Enough is enough.
I reserve the right to change this list any time for any reason.
1) Supershit 666 – Self-Titled (2002) – Not a bad second to be found. Best ever six songs in a row. Perfect. Expensive. Worth every penny.
2) Apocalypse Dudes – Turbonegro (1999) – If all the songs on “Raw Power” were as good as “Search and Destroy” and “Gimme Danger.”
3) Supershitty To The Max – Hellacopters (1997) – “Hell, hell’s exactly what they raised.”
4) Ass Cobra – Turbonegro (1997) – I thought I had outgrown hardcore until I heard this a few years ago. Late to the party.
5) Masters Of Reality – Self-Titled (1988) – They’d be Guns And Roses if Chris Goss wasn’t fat and ugly. Salvages ‘80s music all by itself.
6) Hydromatics – Parts Unknown (2003) – Soul meets kick ass. Expensive. Worth every penny.
7) Queens Of The Stone Age – R (2000) – Makes you feel like you’ve done something bad. Really bad.
8) Cream Of The Crap Volume I – Hellacopters (2002) – Primo mostly Dregen-era Hellacopters. Extraordinary cover material.
9) Cream Of The Crap Volume II – Hellacopters (2004) – Primo mostly later Hellacopters. Extraordinary cover material.
10) Second Thoughts – Split Enz (1976) – Very weird and mostly mellow. Nothing like their later stuff. Never heard an album like it before or since.
11) High Voltage/Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap/Let There Be Rock/Powerage (1976-1978 – impossible to sort them out) – Bon Scott AC/DC. Boogie woogie rock ‘n’ roll at its best. “Highway To Hell” omitted on purpose.
12) Mott The Hoople – The Hoople (1974) – Critics always favor the Mick Ralphs stuff, but this is the best and most rocking.
13) Slade – Sladest (1973) – I teethed on the American version of this album, which doesn’t really exist anymore. More boogie woogie rock ‘n’ roll.
14) Blue Oyster Cult – Secret Treaties (1974) – Made me feel like I was doing bad things when I was 14. Really bad. Still really good.
15) The Specials – More Specials (1980) – Grooves heavily beginning to end. Appreciated more now than when released. Never heard an album like it before or since.
16) Angry Samoans – Back From Samoa (1982) – Very offensive, catchy, next-to-perfect SoCal hardcore album. The 80’s weren’t so bad if you went looking, I guess.
17) David Bowie – Hunky Dory/Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1971-1972) – Sorry, can’t sort these out either. There were other pioneer oddball rockers, but never better than this.
18) Devo – Are We Not Men? (1978) – A bunch of geniuses far ahead of their time. Often wrongly dismissed as a joke.
19) Judas Priest – Sad Wings Of Destiny (1976) – Really heavy in a Black Sabbath kind of way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
20) Thin Lizzy – Jailbreak (1976) – Includes two very overplayed songs, but it’s not their fault. Lizzy’s other albums are uneven, but this is excellent throughout.