Review: 'The Yardbirds'

Despite never making a widely revered LP and hammering out only a handful of truly enduring 45s, The Yardbirds will always be remembered as one of the key British bands because they were the petri dish from which the country's three top blues guitarists—Clapton, Beck, and Page—sprouted. Of course, for those who care to really listen to what the group left behind, The Yardbirds are more than the sum of two truly innovative and electrifying musicians and one would-be B.B. King clone so overrated that acolytes proclaimed him "God" in graffiti all over London. And really, the majority of the Page-led era is pretty execrable. But the Beck-era Yardbirds were indeed one of the best rock bands of mid-sixties Britain, as a listen to "Heart Full of Soul","The Train Kept A-Rollin'", "Over Under Sideways Down", or "Roger the Engineer" will settle. For the quality of such records alone, The Yardbirds would be deserving of a biography of their very own.

Review: 'Yours Cruelly, Elvira'

Struggling actress/improv comedian/showgirl/monster kid Cassandra Peterson wrapped up all her skills and loves into a single package when she got the chance to become the new Vampira for an L.A. TV station in 1981. Thus was born entertainment juggernaut Elvira, infamous for her sexiness, sassiness, dagger wit, and self-assuredness. 

The woman behind the wig is just as sexy and witty as her iconic character, but she wasn't always completely self-assured, which is what makes Yours Cruelly, Elvira a very unexpected autobiography. Peterson's life was hardly as smooth as one of Elvira's effortless one-liners. Alcoholism and drug-addiction ran in her family. Because Peterson made a career of showing as much skin as possible, it is rather shocking to learn that she suffered serious burns as a toddler that scarred a large percentage of her skin for life. Her mother was often cruel and ridiculed young Cassandra's appearance. 

Review: 'Led Zeppelin: All the Albums, All the Songs'

As Martin Popoff admits in his introduction to Led Zeppelin: All the Albums, All the Songs, he is not the first writer to examine every song in the band’s catalogue. The first time I read such a thing was a fairly cursory but appetite-whetting chapter in Charles Cross’s 1991 illustrated history Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell. Dave Lewis did a more thorough job in 2012’s Led Zeppelin: From a Whisper to a Scream, but his book lacked critical distance, a personal touch, and any kind of design aesthetic (there’s also Chris Welch’s Led Zeppelin: The Ultimate Collection from 2016, but I haven’t read that one).

So Popoff rightly recognized that there was room for the more attentive track-by-track study he gives Zep in his recent book. Popoff loves Led Zeppelin, but he also recognizes that their output isn’t flawless. He rightfully acknowledges that “You Shook Me” is boring and that Coda could have been improved without that retread of “I Can’t Quit You Baby”, and though “Achilles Last Stand” is one of my very favorite Zeppelin songs, his criticisms of that beloved track are pretty reasonable. Even with such mildly iconoclastic strokes, Popoff finds something positive to say about almost all of their songs, so the punters won’t get too pissed off. I was kind of hoping he’d sink the knife in a bit deeper when discussing the band’s more overrated recordings (much of Led Zeppelin II, for example), but as a fan, I was pretty satisfied, and I’m always happy when a writer is on the pro side of the highly divisive “Carouselambra” debate.

Beyond its critical angle, All the Albums, All the Songs delivers in terms of history and trivia. Popoff covers the instruments the guys used at particular sessions, right down to Jimmy Page’s guitar-bow specifications (“more tension and more rosin”). I hadn’t known that Johnny Ramone obsessively drilled “Communication Breakdown”, which may largely account for his tireless down stroke technique, and I had no idea what the “merle” mentioned in “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” is until now.

As a publication by the coffee table-centric Voyageur Press, All the Albums, All the Songs is also an eye-grabbing assemblage of color and B&W photos. It also betrays that publisher’s tendency to not cross every T during the editing process, which leaves some sentences hard to decipher (for example: “It’s a strange reference that Plant so fleeting it seems a metaphor” in the write-up on “Ramble On”). Furthermore, the fact that Popoff glosses over anything not on an album released between 1968 and 1982 (barely a mention of “Hey, Hey What Can I Do”, “Travelling Riverside Blues”, “Baby Please Come Home”, etc.) undermines his title. Still, his engaging and attractive book essentially satisfied that appetite for a hearty discussion of Led Zeppelin’s output that Cross stoked nearly thirty years ago.

Review: 'Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production'

Producer Shel Talmy is a controversial figure in sixties pop. He got his first major gig by passing off records by The Beach Boys and Lou Rawls as his own productions (they weren’t). He foisted an old blues song called “Bald Headed Woman” on many of the artists he produced to collect royalties on a song he claimed to have written (he didn’t). He perpetuated a difficult-to-kill rumor that Jimmy Page played on The Kinks “You Really Got Me” (he didn’t), much to the infuriation of Dave Davies. He trapped The Who in a terrible contract that gave him a ridiculous chunk of their royalties, creating legal and financial troubles for the band for years (he did).

Talmy’s machinations were questionable to say the least, but there is no question that he cut some of the weightiest, greatest records released between 1964 and 1970. His signature Wall of Noise is evident in some of the best recordings by The Kinks, The Who, The Easybeats, and The Creation. However, there are also subtler colors and innovations in his work. He gave The Who the go-ahead to stir up so much aural chaos on “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” that most DJ’s thought the record suffered from some sort of awful technical glitch. He caught Eddie Phillips using his innovative guitar-bow technique on The Creation’s mighty “Making Time”. He etched the gentler acoustic sounds on Chad & Jeremy’s “A Summer Song” and beat The Beatles and Moody Blues to the punch by using the Mellotron on Manfred Mann’s “Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James” in 1966.

These are some of the unquestionable classics that appear on an essential and well-annotated new comp from Ace Records called Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production. This 25-song disc is not just a lesson in Talmy’s recording history, but more importantly, a simply smashing collection of sixties records familiar and obscure. The song selection is excellent with The Kinks represented by their finest early single (“Tired of Waiting for You”, personally selected by Ray Davies), rare alternate versions of common items such as Davy “Bowie” Jones’s “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” and The Easybeats’ “Lisa”, and other superb tracks by the likes of Roy Harper, The Nashville Teens, The Pentangle, and Lee Hazelwood, as well as less famous artists such as The Mickey Finn, The Rokes, Lindsay Muir’s Untamed, and The Sneekers, who put a few more bucks in Talmy’s pocket with yet another rendition of “Bald Headed Woman”. Oh, Shel.

Review: 'Night Comes Down: 60s British Mod, R&B, Freakbeat, & Swinging London Nuggets'

Despite a very specific origin in London’s jazzy coffee houses of the early sixties, Mod has gone through so many changes that it basically just means “British” at this point. That elasticity didn’t have to wait until Paul Weller and Phil Daniels reinvigorated the cult in the late seventies; it was already happening ten years time ago in the mid-sixties.

RPM Record’s new triple-disc box Night Comes Down: 60s British Mod, R&B, Freakbeat, & Swinging London Nuggets draws all incarnations of homegrown Mod music in a manner that implies a sort of sound progression by playing with chronology.  Had these 87 tracks been arranged chronologically, they would have sounded like a senseless jumble of cool jazz and R&B, bulls-eye power pop, underground-scene psychedelia, and sprinklings of other styles, such as the more mainstream pop of Twinkle’s “What Am I Doing Here with You” and the eccentric genre-shuffling of the two instrumentals from the soundtrack of the Marianne Faithful vehicle (tee-hee) Girl on a Motorcycle. Instead, the songs are more-or-less arranged according to style, so the set strolls from the kind of hard R&B (Lita Roza’s “Mama”), Booker T.-style work outs (The Mike Cotton Sound’s throbbing “Like That”), and jazzy slow-drips (Laurel Aitken’s “Baby Don’t Do It”) the original Mods dug to the red-with-purple-flowers detonations championed by The Who and The Birds to the U.F.O Club sounds that really have nothing to do with the movement except for maybe giving ex-Mods a spot to drop acid now that they were done popping purple hearts.

Needless to say, the real theme here is “smashing music,” so who cares what’s “real Mod” and what isn’t. That distinction sure doesn’t matter when tracks such as The Moody Blues’ soulful “And My Baby’s Gone” is rubbing elbows with The Attraction’s amp-slashing “She’s a Girl”, Fat Mattress’ trippy “I Don’t Mind”, and Twiggy’s magnificent “When I Think of You”, which somehow draws those three disparate styles together without sounding like some sort of hack-and-glue job. There are other familiar names too, such as Arthur Brown, Spencer Davis Group (post-Stevie Winwood), John’s Children, Chad & Jeremy, Alexis Korner, Mark Wirtz, and Mike D’Abo (as well as tracks featuring such future stars as Jimmy Page and Lemmy, who gets in on the thievery of a “Kids Are Alright” rip so blatant that the track is credited to Townshend), but none of the artists are represented by their best-known numbers, so there’s a lot to discover on Night Comes Down.

A Note on Dave Davies, Jimmy Page, Shel Talmy, and 'The Who FAQ'

Hello, Psychobabble readers. I just want to take a moment to clarify a detail in my new book, The Who FAQ. In my chapter on musicians who guest-starred on Who recordings, I mentioned a much repeated and false claim by producer Shel Talmy that Jimmy Page played rhythm guitar on The Kinks' "You Really Got Me". I indicated that this was merely Talmy's claim and never intended to present it as definitive fact. As the player of the unforgettable riff and astounding lead guitar on that classic song, Dave Davies feels great ownership over it and rightly so. There are few songs in the Rock & Roll pantheon with more iconic guitar playing. 

Nevertheless, I may not have made it sufficiently clear that this was not a fact and that it was merely Talmy's version of what really happened. My source was the producer's interview with Richie Unterberger in his book Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers. In fact, Jimmy Page himself denies playing on the song, which you can in this piece on soundonsound.com here, and in this same piece, Talmy says he does not remember whether or not Page played on the track, further revealing his own shaky grasp on the history of the creation of "You Really Got Me". Once again, the truth is that Page did not play any guitar on "You Really Got Me" whatsoever, nor did he have anything to do with the sound or tone of Dave's guitar. I hope that readers of The Who FAQ will understand that I never intended to indicate otherwise. Talmy's false memory will not appear in future editions of The Who FAQ, including the upcoming Kindle edition.

Obviously, Dave continues to be one of my top Rock & Roll heroes and The Kinks continue to be one of my very favorite bands.

Review: ‘Whole Lotta Zeppelin’ & ‘Neil Young: Long May You Run’

Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin: The Illustrated History of the Heaviest Band of All Time by Jon Bream

Judging Whole Lotta Zeppelin by its cover, I expected it to be as puffy as 1991’s Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell or the booklet in the Led Zeppelin box set. Such illustrated histories are generally more intent on delivering lush photos and drooling fanaticism than true insight and warts-and-all history. Whole Lotta Zeppelin has all those things. Assembled by Jon Bream with a host of guest commentators including Rock journalists and a wide range of famous fans, the book is geared toward a somewhat specific reader. Its partial modus operandi is to take some of the wind out of Zeppelin. This will be unappealing to the worshippers who continue to shrink in awe of the Hammer of the Gods, and the din of the hordes, and the rest of the flatulent mythology. As someone who loves Zeppelin’s music for its power, atmosphere, inventiveness, and cosmic funkiness, yet realizes that the boys in the band can be real jerks and never bought into all the Dungeons and Dragons fantasies or macho super hype, I think Whole Lotta Zeppelin hits the right note. Plant, Bonham, and Page are treated with all due honesty, both as the phenomenal musicians they are and as the creepy misogynists, serial statutory rapists, thieves, and thugs they were during their younger days. Quotes illustrate how unapologetic Page and Plant were about plundering the catalogues of poor blues musicians. An anecdote by Grand Funk Railroad’s Don Brewer captures manager Peter Grant—the so-called fifth member of Led Zeppelin—at his most casually ruthless. Journalist Ellen Sander relays a scary encounter with a couple of unnamed band members that should lose the group some fans. John Paul Jones, of course, emerges unscathed. Even the most demonic Rock band needs its nice guy.



Whole Lotta Zeppelin will also turn off some of the devoted because a good chunk of it is recycled from previously published books and articles. Because it sports so many voices telling the same story, there’s an irritating amount of overlap in the new content too. However, the army of commentators also keeps the telling fresh and the perspective wide ranging. Despite the impression I may have given above, Whole Lotta Zeppelin is not a hatchet job. In fact, some of the “Rock Star” commentaries are tediously fawning; you won’t learn a thing from Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson or Aerosmith’s Joe Perry. But The Hold Steady’s Tad Kubler contextualizes Zeppelin’s music in a fascinating coming of age story that reads like a scene from Over the Edge. The essays on the band’s albums—each written by a different journalist— are thoughtful, lively, and invigoratingly varied. An interview legendary junkie William S. Burroughs conducted with legendary junkie Jimmy Page for Crawdaddy! in 1975 is beyond bizarre and beyond valuable. But the defining commentary arrives as a coda via New Musical Express and Mojo writer Charles Shaar Murray, who expresses all the exasperation and astonishment of Led Zeppelin fandom as well as anyone ever has. The lush photos are awful nice too.


Neil Young: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History by Daniel Durcholz & Gary Graff

Unlike Whole Lotta Zeppelin, Long May You Run is essentially written by two authors, which makes its overlapping information less acceptable. The problem is the structure. This illustrated history is told as a chronological story regularly interrupted by stand-alone essays focusing on Neil Young’s pre-fame period playing in a band with Rick James, his dad, the circumstances behind CSNY’s “Ohio”, a condensed history of Crazy Horse, etc. The main biography and these essays often contain the same material, which is more significant here than it was in the Zeppelin book because Long May You Run doesn’t even break 200 pages, and the abundance of photos means there’s probably only about 100 pages of text. As such, this is more of a traditional illustrated history than Whole Lotta Zeppelin, even though it’s similarly even handed. I’ve never read a proper biography of Young before, so I found Long May You Run to be a perfectly adequate primer. More long-running fans will be more interested in the book on a coffee table level. Like all the Voyageur Press books I’ve perused so far, this is a beautifully designed hardcover that not only has great (and, I’m assuming, rare) photos of Young throughout his various stages (so often we forget that the flannel-swathed one had a bevy of phases to rival Bowie) and his memorabilia, but also sports some really cool illustrations by underground comix-style artist Peter Pontiac.