This was Deep Purple’s first album, containing their hit single, Hush. It is a mix of arty styles—I heard progressive, psychedelic, and classical. The blues and rock songs they covered, such as I’m So Glad, Hey Joe, and Help, are overwrought, I say. I heard a police siren at the start of Hey Joe, which also has some Bolero in it. Help, the Lennon-McCartney tune, is very slow and bluesy. I like the bouncy pop tune more. Mandrake Root was one of their songs; I couldn’t tell if it was a love charm or hallucinogen. The Wiki article said the band knocked this out in a few days, and it does sound casual and a bit slapdash. The important measure of success for any first album is a big hit, so Shades of Deep Purple set the group up for years. When I bought it used in the ‘80s, I thought it would be more like Smoke on the Water.
Steve Goodman, Steve Goodman, Buddah Records, 1971
This record, his first, came out when Goodman was 23. His photo on the cover looks like a high school kid. His song about taking Amtrak from Chicago to New Orleans makes it seem to be exotic and enjoyable. Yet Yellow Coat crams more alienation and despair in one song than Lou Reed singing about heroin. The singer sees an ex at a turnpike plaza; they sit together. He says he’s doing well but mentions only minor pluses that sound false. He asks whether she enjoys her life, remembering little things she enjoyed. His comments to her are ‘did you ever read the letters that I wrote,’ ‘I wish you wouldn’t look at me that way,’ and ‘have you heard a single thing I’ve said.’ It seems tragic when he says he can’t remember why they never had children. As he leaves, he says the weather is getting cold—he foreshadows getting old and dying, says me.
Two other songs make me sad. The singer of Eight Ball Blues is worried that he is aging badly as he looks in the mirror. Donald and Lydia are individuals stuck in unhappy conditions. There are lots of folks around but they are each lonely.
Stage Fright, The Band, Capital, 1970
When this record came out after the amazing Music from Big Pink and The Band (called the Brown Album), most fans were disappointed. I’ve read that Robbie Robertson said he couldn’t keep turning out songs like The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; I think he wanted to crank out Surfin’ USA and My Sharona. This album is light-hearted (says me), less polished, without so many vocal harmonies as the first two.
Sleeping contains ‘to be called by noon/is to be called too soon.’ That doesn’t match the simple country boy pose the record adopts. Just Another Whistle Stop starts ‘to all concerned, dead or alive,’ which is just silly. It moves on with ‘to grind the axe until it’s dull/you’ve got to get it through your skull.’ It closes ‘there’s one way home that’s guaranteed’ without being morbid. The Shape I’m In has ‘out of nine lives, I spent seven/now how in the world/do you get to heaven?’ Some funny juxtapositions: ‘Save your neck or save your brother/looks like it’s one or the other’; ‘I just spent 60 days in the jailhouse/for the crime of having no dough, no, no/Now here I am back on the street/for the crime of having nowhere to go.’ Richard Manuel seemed to have fun with the lyrics. There’s nice organ work on The Shape I’m In. Stage Fright has a strong instrumental intro. Daniel and the Sacred Harp combines Robert Johnson, Faust, and an Old Testament feel. This was better than I remembered.
Twangin…, Dave Edmunds, Swan Song, 1981
This record was a big disappointment. Edmunds is a great rock and roller. Wait until we get to Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance he did when he was with Love Sculpture. In 1981 he was on a long hot streak—I Knew the Bride, Get Out of Denver, Crawling from the Wreckage, Girls Talk, Promised Land. He was working with Nick Lowe and Rockpile. This record may have been something to satisfy a contract—the Wikipedia article says much of the material was odds and ends from other sessions. Edmunds does a lot of covers—maybe his more successful projects started with better songs.
Otis Blackwell, These Are My Songs!, Inner City, 1977
I like the song Fever. I’ve heard it punk, country, Americana, jazz, and psychedelic rock and roll, and it holds up. Blackwell wrote it (with Eddie Cooley), along with many other rock and R & B hits: All Shook Up, Daddy Rollin’ Stone, Great Balls of Fire, Don’t Be Cruel, Handy Man, Return to Sender (I love that song), Searchin’, Let’s Talk About Us, Breathless, and Hey Little Girl—those are just the songs on this record. There was a tribute album for Blackwell released in 1994. Among the artists recording a song for it were Dave Edmunds, Kris Kristofferson, Debbie Harry, the Smithereens, Tom Verlaine, Graham Parker, and Ronnie Spector.
The Best of the Boston Beat, various artists, Infinity Records, 1979
This compilation features one song each by a dozen bands from Boston. I bought this record used for the song by the Fools. I liked them since I heard their parody of Psychokiller. (I remain immature.) Imagine mocking the Talking Heads in 1979. I found Sold Out in a cut-out bin in 1980 and pick up their stuff as I can. This record has She Looks Alright in the Dark, faint praise. It updates Ben Franklin about how cats look at night. Wikipedia refers to the band in the present tense, so they are still active. The rest of the record is okay.
Canned Heat, Canned Heat, Liberty, 1967
This album was the first time I heard ‘If you don’t like my taters, don’t you tickle my vine.’ It’s cute, but I don’t think anyone really ever said it. This was a pretty impressive group of kids playing blues standards on this LP. The liner notes called the guitar playing of Henry Vestine ‘incendiary,’ which is about right. Larry Taylor probably sold as many records as Muddy Waters—he played bass on Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees. Al Wilson wrote scholarly analysis about Robert Pete Williams and Son House, which help prompt academics to take the blues seriously. He was also good on slide guitar and harmonica. Frank Cook had experience with pop success drumming behind Shirley Ellis and Dobie Gray.
The band sold well. This album made it to #76 on the charts, says Wikipedia. The band played at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967, as well as Woodstock. They had three big hit singles.
Golden Apples of the Sun, Judy Collins, Elektra, 1962
Yeats’ poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, is the source of the golden apples reference. It starts, ‘I went out to the hazel wood/Because a fire was in my head.’ That was divine inspiration, I’ve always thought. The poem popped into my head the other day and so I dug out this record. The liner notes say Collins has ‘clean, fresh beauty, gamine manner, and vivacious stage presence’ and get more sexist and patronizing from there. I’ll say it: Judy Collins had a wonderful voice. I have five more of her albums to play through to show it.
Great Selchie of Shule Skerry is the strangest story in a song so far. It starts with a woman nursing a baby, wondering where it came from, and ends with a her husband killing a seal that was the baby’s father. This album has a song named Fannerio that so far as I can tell has nothing in common with the Grateful Dead song Dire Wolf that mentions the backwash of Fannerio.
Lonnie Brooks Band, Turn on the Night, Alligator Records, 1982
I saw Brooks twice in the late ‘70s. He was a solid performer—he could play, sing, and entertain. His band did a first-rate combination of Chicago blues, Louisiana blues, rhythm and blues, and swamp music. He was born Lee Baker, Jr., and performed as Guitar Junior for a while in Lake Charles, Louisiana. When he moved to Chicago, he found a Guitar Junior there, so he switched to Lonnie Brooks. Wikipedia says Brooks made friends with Roy Clark at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1980, getting an appearance on Hee Haw out of it. Johnny Winter was a big fan.
My favorite song on this record is Mother Nature. The lyrics reminded me a bit of Sonny Boy Williamson—if a man comes to you right/you can turn a winter night into spring. Later: he’ll smell flowers over everything. On the other hand, you can be so cold baby/I’d swear you were soul on ice. That’s the first Eldridge Cleaver reference in this play-through; we’ll get to Country Joe McDonald doing Air Algiers.
Aftermath, Rolling Stones, London Records, 1966
Many people like this album. Its Wikipedia page starts, “Considered by music scholars to be an artistic breakthrough …” I say not so fast. It is the band’s first record of their own work, which is a step on the road to musical maturity. But they had been covering Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and Marvin Gaye, to pick a few, so it’s not as if their songs replaced Bobby Goldsboro. Their material includes signs they had toured too much—Going Home is an 11-minute wish and Flight 505 is a first-person report of a plane crash. They needed some home cooking. The songs about women and relationships are high-school exaggerations—her eyes are just kept to herself, while I, I can still look at someone else. Under My Thumb is easy to parody—I thought I remembered Bianca’s Tune that said Mick was under her heel. Lady Jane is a D.H. Lawrence euphemism for genitals. Dontcha Bother Me is two and a half minutes describing vapid behavior; I couldn’t tell whose. Think repeats ‘tell me whose fault was that, babe’—if they don’t know, I can’t help. The songs seem less than I remembered.
Paint It Black, on the other hand, keeps growing. It now represents the chaos of the mid-Sixties. Movies about Vietnam and shooting video games use it effectively. The song is about the devastation of a sudden loss—something we are all very aware of anymore.
converselyspeaking 