Song of the Week – Positive Vibration, Bob Marley & the Wailers

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

Today’s post comes to you from sunny Jamaica. So I feel compelled to go with the obvious and feature some reggae music from Bob Marley. But beyond the Jamaica connection, the other reason to pick Marley for today’s SotW is because today is New Year’s Eve. As we put 2016 and the ugly presidential election campaign behind us, we need to focus hard on positive messages for 2017.

Bob Marley offers that to us with the lead off track, “Positive Vibration” from the 40 year old album, Rastaman Vibration.

Rastaman Vibration was the first Marley album that I really paid a lot of attention to, so it is one of my favorites. When it was released in the first half of 1976, it went all the way to #8 on the Billboard album charts. That was Marley’s best showing in the US.

Interestingly, Rastaman Vibration included some of Marley’s most political songs such as “Crazy Baldhead” (racial themes), “War” (adapted from a speech by Haile Salassie to the UN) and “Rat Race” (Jamaica’s role in the cold war). One wouldn’t think this would be the music embraced in the US at the height of the disco boom but I guess they were totally different audiences.

Another peculiar thing about Rastaman Vibration is that not a single song from this popular album was included in Marley’s massively successful “best of” album, Legend; not even the popular “Root, Rock, Reggae.”

If you check out the writing credits for the compositions on Rastaman Vibration, most of them are by friends and relatives of Marley. However there’s no question about it the Bob Marley wrote the songs. Apparently he did this due to a contractual dispute he was having with his publishing company at the time.

So let’s get back to “Positive Vibration.”

Rastaman vibration, yeah, positive
Live if you want to live
I’n’I vibration yeah, positive
Got to have a good vibe
I a man Iration, yeah, Irie ites
Positive vibration, yeah, positive
If you get down and you quarrel everyday
You’re saying prayers to the devils, I say, wooh
Why not help one another on the way?
Make it much easier (just a little bit easier)

Say you just can’t live that negative way
You know what I mean
Make way for the positive day
‘Cause it’s a new day
And it’s a new time
Yes, it’s a new feelin’
Said it’s a new sign
Oh, what a new day

Happy New Year, and enjoy… until next week.

Neutral Milk Hotel, Ghost

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Lindsay turned me onto these guys a couple of years ago, and I really liked the cut she sent, The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1. But, I sort of forgot about the band and while I was Xmas shopping on Amazon, up the band Neutral Milk Hotel appeared along with that wonderful, “people who bought this also bought nnnnn” where “n” is the variable for what you bought or are buying.

So, I dropped the album on my Spotify playlist and it is kind of fun: Every once in a while a song from the album pops up, like this really nice cut, Ghost.

I like these guys. And, it is fun to have some new shit to listen too. I am a cranky old man: so hard to please.

On A Positive Note

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Remember Sheer Mag? Hardore-y band from Philly with a chick singer who Peter discovered a while back. I liked what Peter posted, but they didn’t have any kind of CD or album one could buy at the time (at least easily), so they kind of fell by my wayside.

Well, apparently somewhere along the line, they made a full-length CD and this track was mentioned as a Best Song of 2016 in Washington Post today.

Kicks ass IMHO. I’m gonna order the CD on Amazon immediately. Start with Thin Lizzy duel guitars and you always have me halfway there right off the bat.

Underground Garage And Sucky Ramones

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When Howard Stern’s on vacation (seems about a third of the time between four-day weekends and two-week vacations every couple months), I’ll listen to Little Steven’s Underground Garage on my XM in the car. It could be way better for sure, but it’s as good as radio gets these days, by leaps and bounds.

Complaints:

1) Way too much Joan Jett
2) Garage is the main course (of course – and that’s OK), but when it’s not garage the leaning is more toward Americana than the hard rock I’d prefer. Some hard rock gets played, but not nearly enough.
3) Seems The Ramones I hear is always of the later “suck” variety.

For me, The Ramones are 80 percent the first three albums – all masterpieces, whichever one I’m listening to is the best. The fourth, Road To Ruin, is pretty damn good. The Phil Spector album has its moments. After that, it’s shit city.

I hear this song on Underground Garage more than any other Ramones and it’s horrible. Where’s Johnny’s guitar? The hard edge is completely gone in a wash of poppy, keyboardy drivel. If The Ramones were this from the beginning, I wouldn’t even like them.

801, TNK

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Another contribution to great Beatles covers, this is one hell of a deconstructed version as well, one I love, and one that is so appropriate for the holiday.

That is because I first heard this song, driving home from my friend Cathy Fabun’s, on Christmas Eve of 1977.

Cathy lived in Richmond, about five miles from where I lived in Berkeley, and she was a pretty new friend at the time. Cathy always held court Christmas Eve, so I was invited and it was good fun. At the time Columbian was still the dope we smoked, but Maui Wowie did make an appearance each fall, and that fall I had some.

I left Cathy’s house around ten, and it was indeed a beautiful, crisp night. Instead of driving on Interstate 80, I took the Eastshore Highway which parallels 80, but is a two-lane road that hugs the bay. The lights of the bridges and city were glistening so beautifully–and they still do for me–that I wanted to drive closer.

And, at the time, I drove one of those mid-engine Porsche 914’s which was kind of like a little spaceship.

So, I am stoned, driving down by the water in some otherworldly fashion, and this tripped out psychedelic version comes on KSAN, then the killer FM free form station that served the area.

“What the fuck is this?” I wondered. Next day I bought the album, I also own it on CD. It pretty much kills all over. And, this is the lead track.

Song of the Week – War in Peace, Alexander “Skip” Spence

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

It seems like every rock music critic/writer has put together a list of “the best albums you’ve never heard.” And one of the albums that is on just about everyone’s list is Oar by Alexander “Skip” Spence.

Spence was the drummer in the original Jefferson Airplane and one of the founders of San Francisco’s Moby Grape. In 1968, after he left the group (after attempting to go all Lizzy Borden on a couple of his bandmates), ended up in New York’s Bellvue Hospital for about 6 months. There he wrote the songs for Oar that he recorded in Nashville, playing all of the instruments himself – about a year before Paul McCartney pulled the same trick on his own debut solo album.

Oar is emotionally raw and can be very depressing at times. But it is also one of the most authentic records I’ve ever heard and that’s what ultimately give it its legs.

The SotW is “War in Peace.”

I discovered a website called Julian Cope’s Head Heritage that has a feature called The Book of Seth. Several times a year Seth writes a review of an Unsung album or 45. In February 2004 he featured Oar. Here’s what he had to say about today’s SotW:

“The weightless “War In Peace” is an emanation from eternity’s echo chamber. Spence’s electric lead guitar bursts in midway — chipped, fragmentary and falling like glittering silt as echoed whispering and whistling crisscross the patch of snapped tight hit-hats and bass lines like posts demarcating an unswerving boundary into the distance. By the time the electric guitar solo arrives, the infamously shattered “Sunshine Of Your Love” riff is already stumbling down a ravine in slow motion hitting branches, bouncing off rocks and causing landslides while atomic particles just collect and disperse in its wake until finally breaking down into a cosmic freefall beyond their once dimensional limitations.”

There’s not much I can add to that!

Wikipedia reports that the album was the lowest selling record in the Columbia Records catalog, deleted and relegated to the cut out bins in less than a year. I’d love to have one of those copies!

Enjoy… until next week.

Dirty Projectors, Impregnable Question

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I watched a movie which ended with this bit of romantic abstraction. About half way through I said, holy cow, that’s Dirty Projectors. And it was.

I’ve pitched Dirty Projectors before, a few years ago, and this song is from the same era.

This is art rock, totally. Can’t apologize for that, but it moves me. And I can’t apologize for that.