Review: 'Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios'

What do Electric Ladyland, There's a Riot Goin' On, Black Sabbath Vol. 4, Innervisions, Rumours, Cheap Trick '77, Parallel Lines, a spiffy 12-track machine, a room-size Moog, a suite of sex-fetish rooms, and 162 tons of cocaine have in common? They're all among the ingredients that made the Record Plant THE Record Plant. 

Founded by engineer Gary Kellgren, the Record Plant was the first successful studio by and for hippies. He decked the place out with high-tech equipment (a board capable of recording twelve tracks...twelve!) and, inspired by the perpetual skinny-dipping party at Peter Tork's house, an atmosphere of sexual and chemical malaise. It's where rock and rollers could escape the sterility of their grampa's recording studios to rock out, experiment, snort, and screw as much as their bodies and labels' budgets could bear.

Review: 'The Complete Illustrated History of Fleetwood Mac'

Fleetwood Mac's story is often more interesting than their music. At their best, they courted legit weirdness (the invigorating and eclectic Tusk) or at least made finely crafted radio-ready pop that burned with personal intensity (Rumours). That intensity was a consequence of their oft-told story: a genuine rock soap opera of hook ups, break ups, packing up, and shacking up. However, they began as a hit-or-miss British blues band and went through several nondescript incarnations on their way to becoming the cross-Atlantic juggernaut that recorded and stirred Rumours. Even that mega-selling monster is a hit-or-miss affair with Lindsey Buckingham's bitter Buddy Holly riffs and Stevie Nicks's bewitching ballads sitting alongside Christine McVie's MOR soft pop stylings.

Originally published in 2016, and now being reprinted, Richie Unterberger's The Complete Illustrated History of Fleetwood Mac traces the group from their beginnings as a vehicle for Peter Green's bluesy slow hand through their metamorphosis into the Buckingham-Nicks machine. Unterberger's writing is informative and as straight-forward as a McVie torch song but a welcome bit of Buckingham oddness intrudes on the narrative with LP-overviews by an all-star roster of guest contributors, such as Dominic Priore (Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!), Barney Hoskyns (Small Town Talk), Martin Popoff (Anthem: Rush in the 1970s), Zoë Howe (Stevie Nicks--Visions, Dreams, an Rumours), and Anthony DeCurtis (Rolling Stone). There are also plenty of full-color and B&W pics of Stevie Nicks in her top hat and Mick Fleetwood with his mouth hanging open.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Matthew Sweet's 'Altered Beast'

When critics fell over themselves to praise Matthew Sweet’s breakthrough, Girlfriend, they tended to focus on the music’s sweetness: the glimmering jangle of his overdubbed guitars, the comforting retro-ness of his Beatles and Byrds references, the classic concision of his songs, the lushness of Fred Maher’s production. So when Sweet followed that big hit with the deliberately messy and acidic Altered Beast, a lot of the critics were baffled. Perhaps they hadn’t been listening close enough to the underlying nastiness of Girlfriend tracks such as “Thought I Knew You”, “Does She Talk?”, and “Holy War”. If they had been, Altered Beast would have seemed like a more logical progression as Sweet builds on the bitterness of such songs with production to match. Yes, Richard Dashut is best known as Fleetwood Mac’s smash-era producer, but Sweet didn’t hire Dashut for his pristine work on Rumours. Sweet was more interested in channeling the sloppy derangement of Tusk, and just as Tusk was more fascinating and challenging than Rumours, Altered Beast is—in this reviewer’s perhaps unpopular opinion—a similar improvement over Girlfriend. 

The polish flakes away as rusty guitars roar, well-deep drums bash, and Sweet sneers and spits. “Dinosaur Act”, “Devil with the Green Eyes”, “Ugly Truth Rock”, “In Too Deep”, and especially “Knowing People” are straight-up mean, and their loathing feels more authentic than the mass of Sweet’s grungier contemporaries because of his pop rep. It sounds like he was willing to burn down his critical good will for the sake of getting something toxic off his chest. He did make room for some of the more soothing pop styles of Girlfriend, though “Life without You”, “Time Capsule”, “What Do You Know?”, and “Someone to Pull the Trigger” do not skimp on the despair. So while the production sounds messy, the vision is actually quite focused, and for my money, Altered Beast is Matthew Sweet’s underappreciated peak.

Intervention Records’ 100% analog audiophile edition of Altered Beast—the second release in its trilogy of Sweet reissues—doesn’t clean up that messy sound; it just presents its with startling clarity, authenticity, and sonic might. Guitars are remarkably present whether grinding out on “Dinosaur Act”, shimmering on “Time Capsule”, or booming from a bottomless pit on “In Too Deep”. Details reveal themselves. Until now I’d never really noticed that weird percussive touch on “Someone to Pull the Trigger” that sounds like Sweet brushing his teeth.

Intervention’s vinyl is presented as a double album with bonus tracks on Side Four, which shifts the natural side divider—that goofy audio clip from Caligula—to the middle of Side Two (an even weirder Caligula clip hidden at the end of the original CD edition is left out entirely). Bonus tracks are stronger than those on Intervention’s recent edition of 100% Fun. They include what may be Sweet’s best non-LP tracks—the corrosive “Superdeformed” from the No Alternative compilation—and all B-sides from the “Ugly Truth” and “Time Capsule” singles (though not the “Devil with the Green Eyes” single), as well as “Bovine Connection” from the extended Japanese edition of Son of Altered Beast. The American edition of that E.P. will presumably be the next installment of Intervention’s Matthew Sweet vinyl campaign, which remains the vinyl reissue campaign to beat in 2018.

Review: 'Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks'

Stephen Davis’s The Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga is the infamously salacious story of the seventies’ hugest hard rock group, and often considered to be the definitive rock biography for its grotesque tales of sex slavery, Satanism, and sand sharks. The decade’s hugest soft rock group, Fleetwood Mac, perhaps didn’t slam out riffs as devastatingly as Zeppelin did, and they certainly never did half the horrid things Davis accused Zeppelin of doing, but their self-zombification through cocaine is legendarily decadent.

However, Davis’s new biography of the Mac’s central star, Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks is more relentlessly sad than page-turningly sleazy à la Hammer of the Gods. This is due to the main villain of a story with quite a few of them. Lindsey Buckingham apparently subjected the singer to decades of mental and physical abuse, from the relatively early days of their musical/“romantic” relationship when he browbeat her into posing nude on the cover of their Buckingham/Nicks LP to when he physically attacked her in front of the entire band while planning to tour behind Tango in the Night to his general cold, calculated, and creepy behavior toward her through the more recent reunions. It’s painful to read about how her successful solo career seemed to free her from Buckingham’s proximity yet she serially fell back into working with him again for various reasons. The devastating punch-line of this story that comes with the birth of Buckingham’s first child in 1998 is even more painful and a sad statement on the dependent nature of abusive relationships.

There isn’t much that lightens the mood of Gold Dust Woman, though the fact that Davis is so firmly in Nicks’s corner is heartening, and he reaffirms his mastery of writing a rock biography that is more than a rock biography by creating actual atmosphere, which is not necessarily considered an essential element of the rock biography. He does so by setting an appropriately witchy mood by delving into the mystical history of Wales to build Nicks’s cultural background or recreating the dank, stygian atmosphere of the “Gold Dust Woman” recording session. At times, Davis can get a bit repetitious—we could feed the world’s poor with a dollar for every time he refers to “Rhiannon” as the “old Welsh witch”—but as a whole Gold Dust Woman is a fine biography— though a depressing one that may make you want to take a long break from the music Lindsey Buckingham masterminded.

Review: 'Steve Miller Band Ultimate Hits'

The Steve Miller Band made some of the most simplistically pleasurable hits of the seventies.  Yet Steve Miller’s career is a complicated wad of contradictions. Before becoming a superstar for making zillions with conservative pop like “The Joker”, “Jet Airliner”, and “Take the Money and Run”, he was a cosmic bluesman in the West Coast underground scene. He became a major superstar despite being almost completely faceless. Although his songs have shamelessly ripped off Cream, Joe Walsh, The Mamas and the Papas, Free, and even himself (“Fly Like an Eagle” recycles the riff of 1969’s “My Dark Hour”, and “Take the Money and Run” recycles everything but the lyrics of 1969’s “Kow Kow Calculator”), the songs somehow transcend that issue. In other words, listening to “Rocky Mountain Way” doesn’t really scratch the same itch that “The Stake” does. Despite the fact that his music doesn’t even have the emotional core of hits by similar seventies megastars such as Fleetwood Mac and Elton John, those songs have connected with millions of people. Seemingly everyone born before 1975 has had the original Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 1974-78 in her or his record collection at some time.

The interesting thing about the new compilation Ultimate Hits is how it attempts to sort through those contradictions. The set attempts to put a face on Miller by beginning not with his hits, but his personal history and voice. It begins with a short audio clip recorded during his childhood in which an older relative tells him he has a great voice and will find great success with it (the tuneless “la la las” that follow drop a hilarious punch line on the clip). Next up is a live version of “Gangster of Love” that begins with three minutes of Miller’s personal monologue on a background that is actually quite extraordinary: his godfather was Les Paul, who taught Miller his first few chords, and T Bone Walker continued that education.

After those four minutes of speech that effectively humanizes the hit machine, we get into a semi-chronological trip through the early psychedelic blues (though much of it is presented in live versions from later in his career), hey-day hits, slightly new wavey eighties period, and more recent recordings that forces listeners to hear beyond the 1974-78 radio-focused compartmentalization of the old Greatest Hits. Miller does not emerge from this set on the same level as the most individual artists of his generation, nor even as potent as Fleetwood Mac or Elton John—he’s too dependent on the musical ideas of others and too emotionless for that—but it does draw a more complete portrait of the real human behind the hits than any previous compilation. And more importantly, “The Joker”, “Jet Airliner”, “Take the Money and Run”, and the rest are still pleasing to hear forty years on.