Zoot Money's Big Roll band is one of those group's you read about a bit if you're into sixties British rock, but outside of the ephemeral live scene, their biggest contribution to rock was a certain young guitar-whiz named Andy Summers. Their music was fairly generic big-band British soul and blues in the vein of Manfred Mann, although Money's mildly hoarse soul shout was full of personality and Summers, of course, is no slouch when wielding an axe.
As we reach the penultimate month of Elemental Music's year of Motown vinyl reissues we receive three rather different records. The earliest of these is one of Motown's courting-the-old-folks discs, although unlike the label's stodgier efforts in this arena, which tended to force The Four Tops or The Supremes to croon show tunes or corny standards, Marvin Gaye's When I'm Alone I Cry is something else entirely. In fact, Gaye had greater ambitions to be the next Nat King Cole than to be the next Smokey Robinson, so his heart was completely in this album. It's a genuine class act, marrying Gaye's classically fine voice with beautiful big band arrangements. This is a record that actually deserved to win over an older audience of discerning listeners. Moody and gorgeous.
"This is a book that's designed to start arguments." That's the way editor Gary Graff begins 501 Essential Albums of the 90s: The Music Fan's Definitive Guide, and really, it's the only way it could begin. Graff knows as well as anyone who has yet to even crack the cover of a book of this sort that there are going to be painful omissions and a fair share of painful inclusions. Even though I've written a book along these lines and know the pitfalls of doing such a thing all too well, I still allowed my teeth to grind at the absence of anything by Grant Lee Buffalo, Suzanne Vega, Throwing Muses, Belly, Juliana Hatfield, Shudder to Think, and quite a few other artists that I feel any guide that calls itself "definitive" can't do without. I also gagged at the inclusions of objectively crappy artifacts from the likes of Brian Adams, Meatloaf, Sponge, Bush, Britney Spears, Korn, and...well...I can really go on and on and on on that account.
Mel Brooks is widely and rightfully considered to be one of the giants of comedy cinema, although that reputation mostly hinges on just a few movies. Sure, a dedicated few may thump tubs for High Anxiety, History of the World Part 1, or even Space Balls, but if we're being honest, Brooks's screen rep is really down to The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. Amazingly, the latter two films came out in the same year. Only Roxy Music used 1974 as well as Mel Brooks did.
Because their videos were staples in the early days of MTV, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers always had a vague new-wave whiff, even though they were really sixties-rock revivalists in the jangly Byrds/Love mode. They actually embraced some specific semblance of new-waveyness when experimenting with synthesizers on their first post-MTV LP, Long After Dark. The video for the synth-laced "You Got Lucky' even had a sort of futuristic Mad Max-on-a-budget feel. However, the foundation of the track was pure Arthur Lee-toughness, and that barely compromised rock and roll attitude flushed through the rest of the album, too.
Star Trek-The Illustrated Oral History: The Original Cast is not the first oral history of that boldly going sci-fi archetype, but it's unique in that all of its quotes were pulled from a single source—Titan's long-running Star Trek Magazine— and that "illustrated" bit. This is a beautiful little book, illustrated with color photos of what could be TV's most splendidly vivid series.
After The Who broke up, Pete Townshend seemed to want to distance himself from his old band's roiling and raw hard rock as much as possible, so he issued a series of slick LP musicals that ranged from the personal to the surprisingly impersonal. First up was a project of the former stripe, as White City was largely inspired by Townshend's experiences working alongside his then-wife in a women's shelter, and though it revealed its 1985 origins with its synthesizers and glossy production, there was still some bite in tracks like "Give Blood" and "Secondhand Love". With its themes of anger, shame, and fame, White City was nearly as personal a record as either of Townshend's two more Who-like ones that preceded it.
Unlikely as it was, the mysterious and insular R.E.M. became the biggest college rock band of the eighties, and one of the nineties' biggest bands of any stripe, so they've naturally been the topic of their share of biographies. Yet there's is a tough story to tell with the usual rock and roll salaciousness that pins cynical eyes to pages. Their story is suspiciously lacking in drug-crazed binges, intraband hair-pulling bouts, humiliating flops, and groupie abuse. R.E.M. were basically four nice guys who liked each other. One shouting match during the making of Monster and cutting Peter Holsapple out of the lucrative co-writing credits for "Low" was probably the most Mick-and-Keith things they ever did. Sure, Peter Buck did have that one well-publicized fit of air rage, but mostly he settled for strolling around town in his PJs and robe while tugging on a tallboy to get his ya-yas out.
The dB's got lumped in with the college rockers, but had they been around fifteen years earlier, they would have been a perfectly commercial pop band...albeit one who's best-known song tells the tale of a poor schlub who decides to end it all after his girlfriend not only dumps him but steals all his shit... well, all of it except for his amplifier.
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