Review: Audiophile Vinyl Reissue of Donovan's 'The Hurdy Gurdy Man'

The press loved to cop out and make trite Dylan comparisons, but Donovan was always a much more eclectic creature than that. Even during his early "folkie" days he was playing with jazz on things like "Sunny Goodge Street" that could never be mistaken for Bob. And once he remade himself as a sort of psychedelic-pop mystic, his albums started taking on unique and cohesive flavors quite unlike his initial solo acoustic guitar dominated albums. With his break through, Sunshine Superman, he crafted a fine and florid folk-raga record that made more extensive use of the sitar than The Beatles ever did. With "Mellow Yellow" he committed to coffee-house jazz for much of the record, and with A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, he created a children's record hippie parents surely stomached better than they would The Best of Burl Ives. 

Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

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: '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: '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.

And Now for No Other Reason Than They're Awesome, Here Are Psychobabble's 50 Favorite Album Covers of the Seventies!

And Now for No Other Reason Than They're Awesome, Here Are Psychobabble's 50 Favorite Album Covers of the Sixties!

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 301

The Date: July 27

The Movie: The Song Remains the Same (1976)

What Is It?: Led Zeppelin’s concert film is packaged in all the pretentiousness and bloat one could hope for from one of the most over-the-top Rock & Roll bands of the seventies. The guys reveal themselves in their absurd fantasy sequences. Jimmy Page scales a mountain to retrieve a mystical sword. John Paul Jones attends a lavish, medieval banquet. Robert Plant swash buckles to rescue a damsel in distress. And John Bonham? Well, he races cars. The musical performances are actually much better than the film’s rep suggests, and I for one love all seventeen hours of “Dazed and Confused”. However, Bonham’s track skills are the only thing that might prevent you from fast-forwarding through his year-long drum solo.

Why Today?: On this day in 1973, the filming begins.

Review: 'Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album'

Terry O’Neill photographed some of the most monumental movers and shakers of the twentieth century: JFK, Churchill, Mandella, Blair. That’s very nice for him, but what about the people who made us move and shake? Well, stand back, because this cat has shot The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Ray Davies, Led Zeppelin, Elvises Presley and Costello, Chuck Berry, Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Springsteen, Bowie… I think you get the picture. You can get a slew of them in a new A (for AC/DC) to Z (for Zeppelin) collection of his most iconic and rarest pictures called Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album.

That title is actually slightly misleading because quite a few of the stars between its covers have nothing to do with rocking or rolling (there’s a big spread on Sinatra, who hated the genre). Don’t get too hung up on that because there’s plenty that fits the bill from O’Neill’s earliest swinging snaps of the Fabs, The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, and some very, very young Stones through relatively recent artists such as Blur and Amy Winehouse. She’s the most recent one in the lot because O’Neill admits in his introduction that no one since her has had enough star power to ensnare his interest (I see what he means).

The interesting thing about O’Neill’s work is the way it often subverts our expectations. He’s the one who shot that famous picture of Ozzy in which the evil one looks like he just paid his one hundred bucks at Glamour Shots. He made Liza Minnelli look like Jagger. He made ol’ Lucifer Lips look like a cuddly bear all wrapped up in his fur-lined anorak. Ringo appears to be the lead Beatles as he leaps over the rest of the band in an extraordinary action shot I’d never seen before. He filmed hellion Marc Bolan in a very moving embrace with his infant son.

At other times, O’Neill captured the artists just as we expect them to be, whether it’s Sir Elton posing in his giant wardrobe of outrageous gear or Alice Cooper subverting that Bolan shot hilariously by applying fright makeup to a sleeping baby. Really, there is no unifying style or approach to perceive among the mass of photos in Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album. Color or black and white, candid or staged, funny or po-faced, action-packed or serene, bizarrely normal or normally bizarre, the photos in this big, big, big book really have one thing in common: big, big, big music stardom.

Review: Glyn Johns's 'Sound Man"

Glyn Johns isn’t a household name for anyone but the truest Rock & Roll obsessives. His c.v., however, will blow the most clueless cat’s mind. He has produced, mixed, and engineered recordings for The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Marianne Faithfull, Small Faces, Procol Harum, The Move, Traffic, Belly, Del Shannon, The Clash, and too many other artists to mention. While doing his most memorable work during the hedonistic sixties and seventies, he kept his head the whole time, preferring to fraternize with the era’s soberest players –Ian Stuart and Bill Wyman, for example—while putting in his hours with wild children like Keith Moon, John Bonham, and Keith Richards. Johns may be the only guy in the universe who could come away from a day’s work with Marianne Faithfull madly in love with the studio instead of her.

That clear-headedness is very evident in Johns’s new autobiography Sound Man. While his straightness may not always make for the most rocking and rolling reading, he has rubbed shoulders with so many greats that his behind-the-board perspective brings new angles to some old stories. Although he supports the theory that Mick and Keith were always really the producers behind their greatest hits, he admits to being impressed with Andrew Loog Oldham’s work on his first Rolling Stones session, though he doesn’t get too specific about what impressed him. Gear heads expecting a lot of production tips from one of the industry’s best might be disappointed. Johns aims for a broader audience and doesn’t skip over discussions of his most legendary gigs, such as capturing The Beatles during the tension-fraught Get Back sessions or working with Zeppelin on their debut. His minor recollections make these major stories worth retelling, as when he mentions that Paul McCartney wanted him more involved in the process than he was expecting or hilariously recalls showing off Led Zeppelin’s first recordings to Mick Jagger and George Harrison only to be met with confusion and disgust.

Sometimes Johns’s stories do elevate to the mythic level we expect from a Rock & Roll memoire. He reveals Bob Dylan’s plan to make a record with The Beatles and The Stones (!) and chillingly recounts how Small Faces’ manager Don Arden hired thugs to threaten him at gunpoint. Just as often he brings the myths down to earth, as when he describes The Rolling Stones’ utterly tedious recording process. Johns certainly pulls no punches. Pye Records’ A&R man Toy Hatch is “an unpleasant little shit with a massive ego.” The Stones’ “Sing This All Together” is “drivel.” Phil Spector’s version of Let It Be is “the most syrupy load of bullshit” he “ever heard.” So I guess what Sound Man lacks in Rock & Roll wildness it makes up for with a bit of Rock & Roll attitude.

Review: 'Led Zeppelin from a Whisper to a Scream'

Dave Lewis has written a half-dozen books about Led Zeppelin and has been curating the Zep ‘zine Tight but Loose since 1978. So who am I to refute the “UK’s foremost expert on Led Zeppelin” claim on the cover of his latest book? Well, I don’t doubt that Dave knows his stuff, but after reading the mere four or five books I’ve read about his favorite band, I already knew most of what he had to say in Led Zeppelin from a Whisper to a Scream. I would have loved to see Lewis put his expertise to work a bit more while discussing Led Zeppelin’s discography song by song—more insight, more analysis, more trivia! Instead, we get a skinny volume of less than 150 pages with two timelines that don’t just repeat each other’s information; they repeat information found elsewhere in the book. Lewis should have gone all out with a Revolution in the Head-style study. Led Zeppelin certainly warrants one. As a primer for the Zeppelin newcomer, From a Whisper to a Scream gets the job done. It’s well written and fairly well reasoned (though Lewis evaluates the band’s work with a super fan’s forgiveness), and it covers all the bases from Zeppelin’s official LPs to their reissues and bootlegs, taking us right up to date with the recent 02 Arena concert. Nevertheless, this book is an hors d’oeuvre when I’m pretty sure the hardcore Zep freak is going to want a decadent ten-course banquet.

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.

The Little Things: 20 Underrated Moments in Rock & Roll

We all love a big, hooky chorus and a catchy riff, but sometimes it’s the little things that keep us coming back to our favorite records: a quick grunt here, a flubbed guitar there, a little sonic detail tossed in at the caprice of an extra-creative producer. Some of these small elements have built their own legends, like Roy Orbison’s feline growl in “Oh! Pretty Woman”, Roger Daltrey’s primal scream at the climax of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, and the cold-ending of The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s so Heavy)”. Some are less celebrated, and therefore, riper for rediscovery. So tune up your ears and get nice and vigilant as we go on the lookout for the following 20 magnificent moments that deserve to be memorable ones, too…



1. Elvis’s ghost appears 21 years before the King dies…

Of all the versions of Rodgers and Hart’s standard “Blue Moon” that have been recorded, the most stunning is the one cut by Elvis Presley in 1956. Completely bizarre even by early Rock & Roll standards, Elvis’s voice and the sparse backing of percussion, guitar, and bass are caked in reverb, making it all sound as though it’s being transmitted from beyond the grave. Elvis links the verses with strange falsetto cries, the one at the 1:38 mark being particularly intense. This was as scary as Rock & Roll got before artists like The Velvet Underground, Nico, and The Beatles went avant garde in the late ‘60s. And speaking of The Beatles…

2. The Beatles think sensitive ballads are totally hilarious…

On the precipice of moving beyond the ‘50s Rock & Roll that so deeply influenced their first few records, The Beatles cut a pretty little ballad called “If I Fell” for the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack. The tune couldn’t have been more out of step with the guys’ budding Dylan infatuation, which would come to the fore on their next album. Perhaps John and Paul were a bit self-conscious about the retro-quality of “If I Fell”. That might explain why the latter was unable to suppress his giggles at the tail of the second bridge (Paul cracks on the word “vain” at the 1:45 mark). The culprit certainly couldn’t have been pot, since their intro to the wicked-weed via Dylan was still a good seven months away.

3. Keef’s premature discharge…

Few Rock & Roll songs have been pored over as obsessively as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and few guitar riffs are as deeply ingrained in the collective pop-culture consciousness. Yet, somehow Keith Richards’s big flub at the 2:34 mark has inspired little text. Switching on his fuzz box to launch into the final chorus, Keith farts out a single note, which apparently so discombobulates him that he comes in late on the next riff. A mistake, perhaps, but it puts a funky little exclamation point on the climax of the Stones’ signature hit.

4. Mary Weiss falls in l-u-v…

Has any other group delivered as many way-way-way-cool spoken asides as The Shangri-La’s? Their eternal question of “Is she really going out with him?” at the outset of “Leader of the Pack” was so memorable that Joe Jackson constructed an entire song out of it. Even groovier is Mary Weiss’s improperly spelled declaration that kicks off the attitude-soaked “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”: “When I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, l-u-v.” Once again, the line took on an additional life when David Johansen appropriated it for the intro of The New York Dolls’ “Looking for a Kiss” eight years later.

5. The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil & an armadillo…

Justifiably frustrated with the tame sounds of Surrealistic Pillow, Jefferson Airplane were determined to get as freaky as they desired on their third (and, in my opinion, greatest) record, After Bathing at Baxter’s. The album launches with The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil, a surreal, feedback-riddled ode to A.A. Milne and folk-singer Fred Neil. Or something. Perhaps it’s an ode acid. Yes, definitely acid. An ode to acid. Lots and lots and lots of acid. How else could one explain Grace Slick’s melisma of “Armadillo” during the first bridge (1:11) or Marty Balin’s spoken interjection of that same cryptic word that follows (1:16)?

6. Baker gets a boost…

People love to gush on and on about how “Clapton is god,” but for my money, his six-string contributions to Cream were utterly dwarfed by the otherworldly singing and bassing of Jack Bruce and the tribal thump of Ginger Baker. For all his effortlessly nimble and monstrously muscular ventures around his gigantic kit, Ginger Baker’s most memorable moment in my mind arrives by way of a simple kick drum during the fade of “White Room”. And, in all fairness, it really has more to do with producer Felix Pappalardi than Baker. For whatever reason, Pappalardi decided to raise the level on Baker’s kick to a superhuman level, making the final moments of the record its mightiest.

7. Clayton cracks…

I tried to limit each artist referenced on this list to a single entry, but those bloody Stones offered up too many instances of fleeting genius to trim. Certainly Merry Clayton’s entire cameo halfway through “Gimmie Shelter” rates as one of the greatest performances in Rock & Roll, but it’s the way her voices cracks on her third frenzied shout of “Rape, murder” (3:01) that elevates it to something beyond the beyond. The Stones never had a problem sounding unhinged, but it took a guest to provide their most unhinged moment.

8. Roy Harper’s damage control…

Under normal circumstances, re-recording a song because of a screw-up is an artist’s nightmare (Pete Townshend was so irate that the cleaning staff at Talent Masters Studios broke the tape of “Rael” that he threw a chair through the control room’s glass partition). But imagine if the song in question is 12:25 long! This was the case with the most epic epic on Roy Harper’s quartet of epics, Stormcock. After cutting the best take of “The Same Old Rock”, a venom-spewing screed against organized religion, Harper realized he’d skipped a line. Rather than attempt to recapture the magic take from scratch, he simply faded out his acoustic guitar and sang the line a cappella. The moment (6:04) adds an extra dimension of mystery to an already mysterious… and absolutely gorgeous… recording.

9. Bowie gets bitchy…

Much like when Hendrix would take a completely innocuous phrase like “Aw shucks” and transform it into the most lascivious come-on you ever heard, David Bowie does the same at the end of his Lou Reed-tribute “Queen Bitch”. After wailing the final chorus, he spits an impromptu “You betcha!” (2:58) potent enough to erase two years-worth of Sarah Palin’s folksy idiocy from your memory.

10. Bolan loses it in the count-in…

You can tell that Marc Bolan the serious musician intended to count in “Baby Strange” with a simple “1 and 2 and 3 and 4”. That’s pretty clear. But Bolan the Imp only allows him to get halfway through it, interjecting a spew of funky gibberish, and transforming the count into something like “1 and 2 and BUBBLY BUBBLY BOO BOO YEAH”! As goofy/insane as the exclamation is, after hearing it one or two times, it’s impossible to imagine “Baby Strange” beginning any other way.

11. Seagulls over Brighton…

The Who were on a constant quest for transcendence, which they achieved with some of their most famous recordings (see the primal scream referenced in the introduction to this article). But there are moments of powerful transcendence secreted in some of their more obscure tracks, as well. One hits hard during the third verse of “The Dirty Jobs”, a magnificent yet underappreciated number from Quadrophenia. As the band’s energy level peaks, a seagull-like cry invades the track (2:46), which somehow hits that same emotional g-spot as the scream in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (well, for me, at least). Perhaps the sound effect was meant to conjure images of gulls soaring over Brighton Beach, the spot where the Mod Opera’s main character Jimmy has his most significant experiences. Whatever its purpose, the cry’s plaintive quality, coupled with Daltrey’s emotionally bare vocalizing, makes for a truly transcendent moment. When The Who’s catalogue was subjected to a really misguided remixing in the ‘90s, the gull cry was edited out of “The Dirty Jobs”. I sincerely hope someone lost their job over that moronic decision.

12. Van’s breakdown…

Van Morrison’s voice is as expressive an instrument as, say, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar or John Coltrane’s sax. Fearless, powerful, and endlessly imaginative, Van’s voice does things no human pipes should be able to do. Just listen to Astral Weeks to dig what I’m saying, but if you really want to hear him at his most outre´, spin “Cul De Sac”, an underrated track buried on side B of his altogether underrated LP Veedon Fleece. The song is a loping country-soul number of the sort The Band did so well. Nothing terribly strange here. At least, not until Van apparently decides enough is enough with his band’s low-key restraint and starts, well, freaking out. He does his best approximation of an escaped mental patient as he starts making weird grunting noises through his nose at the 4:38 mark before letting loose a truly terrifying primal scream 17 seconds later, only to resume his nutso grunts with increased fervor (5:25), sounding quite like a pig rooting out truffles. Brilliant!

13. John Cale stumbles…

John Cale’s avant garde background seems eons away for the majority of “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend”, a poppy piano-based number that isn’t really that different from Elton John’s more creative songs. The song plods along excitingly in that manner for it’s first 3:09. Then, following a brief piano/guitar break, a reverb-drenched bass thuds through the floor, and Cale stumbles in on the off-beat to howl the refrain like a feral freak until the track’s completion. That introductory moment when Hell breaks loose across “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend indicates the unpredictable direction the rest of the Fear album… and Cale’s career… would take.

14. Bonzo’s funky prelude…

I remember praising the brilliance of John Bonham’s hi-hat rhythm that leads into “Night Flight” to my Led Zep-crazed friends when I was in high school, and they could never see what the big deal was. Surely, for a band that paid as much attention to detail as Led Zeppelin did, this barely audible 2-second bit of hi-hat is a relatively minor moment. Yet I think it’s such a funky little spin on the usual “1-2-3-4” count-in that it defines why Bonham’s style was so much more than the “BOOM-CRASH-BOOM-CRASH” beat it is so often pigeonholed as better than all the soloing in “Moby Dick” (which lasts for roughly four and a half months).

15. Joe Strummer thinks he’s a chicken…

The best songs by “The Only Band That Matters” were seething wake-up calls to the injustice and oppression looming over us all. On the title track of The Clash’s greatest record, London Calling, Joe Strummer puts a particularly fine point on this by “cock-a-doodle-do-ing” like a rooster. It’s a moment that might have been undignified coming from a less confident singer. Coming from Strummer after 2:38 of prophetic growling about punters nodding out amidst the threat of nuclear war, that cockcrow is the ultimate wake-up.

16. The snarl…

Chrissie Hynde made a career out of subverting sexual stereotypes about women in Rock & Roll. She decked herself in tattered jeans and leather jackets in stark contrast to Debbie Harry’s miniskirts. She hunched before the microphone like a scoliosis patient with her Telecaster slung down at her knees. Her scraggly hair hung in her face to such a degree that you couldn’t really tell what she looked like at all. And, yet, she oozed sexuality as much as Harry or Brigitte Bardot or Jagger or anyone else because of her uncompromising lyrics (see “Tattooed Love Boys”), her unflinching attitude, and her huskily expressive voice. If you can hear Hynde’s from-the-diaphragm snarl 15 seconds into “The Wait” without getting a little turned on, check yourself into the local morgue, because you’re dead.

17. Revving up…

The Revillos’ debut was one of the most exciting albums of 1980, and its title track gets started in a manner that both peaks that excitement level barely two songs into the record and sums up the Revillos’ cartoony appeal. After the sound of a motorcycle racing off and a psychotic little guitar riff play at chipmunk speed, the tape slows down to normal speed like an elastic band snapping back into place. Yet the band still races through “Rev Up” at hyper-speed. A rush in every sense of the word.

18. The Damned do Lorre…

The Damned rarely took their Goth-leanings or Monster Movie-obsessions very seriously, which suited the band just fine. Take “Grimly Fiendish”, their sizable UK hit that paid tribute to the villainous Grimly Feendish from the comic books Wham! and Smash!. They deliver this ode to a very “bad boy” as if it’s an outtake from The Who’s cartoony masterpiece The Who Sell Out (the mood of Edwardian gloom is reminiscent of Entwistle’s “Silas Stingy”, while that “bad lad, bad boy” chorus is lifted straight from “Our Love Was”). An extra element of comic book ghoulishness was left off the version in the official running order of the Phantasmagoria album and the A-side of the “Grimly Fiendish” single. Someone (chief singer Dave Vanian, perhaps?) utters the title in a sniveling imitation of cinematic villain Peter Lorre in the “Bad Trip Mix” included as a bonus track on the Phantasmagoria CD and the “Grimly Fiendish” 12” single. It’s a neat moment repeated throughout the song (first appearance: 00:29) that helps make the “Bad Trip Mix” the definitive mix.

19. The other Elvis’s ghost screams at us from Mars…

The punks scoffed at Elvis Costello, because even in 1977, they could tell his heart was more into Cole Porter-style song craft than Johnny Rotten-style raving. Yet, Costello is one of the all-time great ravers. His screams are unparalleled. If you can figure out how he got his vocal cords to squeeze out those screeches in “Playboy to a Man” without the aid of helium, please drop me a line. Another amazing example of his lunatic yelping can be heard 6:02 into the pounding “Tokyo Storm Warning” from Blood and Chocolate. Costello lets off a scream at the track’s climax that, when bolstered by a burst of repeat-echo, sounds like a ray gun zapping down from another planet.

20. Kristin Hersh thinks she’s a goat…

Of all the angular elements that comprise the Throwing Muses sound, the most potent one is Kristin Hersh’s voice. She could scream as violently as her buddy Black Francis from The Pixies, belt as powerfully as Grace Slick, and coo as delicately as George Harrison. On "Colder", the opening song of the Muses’ first consistently great album, House Tornado, she detonates all her vocal fireworks, culminating in a round of bizarre bleating at the 3:01 mark. It’s chilling and thrilling and as memorable a moment as any other on this list.

Track by Track: ‘Cheap Trick’ by Cheap Trick

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, I’ll be taking a close look at albums of the classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them Track by Track.

1977: the year that Punk provided Rock & Roll with a much-needed high colonic. The new guard led by The Clash and The Sex Pistols chided the old guard of classic rockers (“No Beatles, Elvis, or the Rolling Stones in 1977”) no matter how much that new guard owed to the old one. Still, punk did its damnedest to flush out the pretentious concepts, endless guitar and drum solos, and godlier than thou stance that had been dominating popular music since the end of the ‘60s. The punks initially scoffed at the artiness that had seeped into Rock & Roll since psychedelic ’67, though, many of them—including The Clash, The Damned, Radio Birdman, Pere Ubu, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Adverts, and The Buzzcocks— would soon incorporate many psych trappings in their most interesting work. If it wasn’t raw, raunchy, shouted, and shredded, it was nowhere. And though the best punks welcomed elements of old-fashioned, Who-inspired power pop into their music, they were careful not to stray too far from the two-chords-and-a-pissy-attitude formula (another posture that would soon fade). This is why the purists cast a skeptical eye toward folks like The Jam, Joe Jackson, and Elvis Costello, with their skinny ties and pesky melodies.




Cheap Trick never received flack for being posers the way Weller, Jackson, or Costello did because they operated on their own power-pop planet. Too polished for the punks, too snide for the classic rockers, Cheap Trick was a band bred for culthood. Robin Zander may have looked the golden god, with his pretty puss and blonde mane, but his demented yowl may have even been too much for the Zep Heads. Rick Nielsen’s lead guitar work (“and when we say lead, we’re not kidding: he’s got thirty-five guitars” future novelist Eric von Lustbader boasted in the original liner notes) could go head-to-head with that of Jimmy Page, but his Huntz Hall get up wasn’t going to get him on any centerfolds. Bun E. Carlos looked more like he should be wiping dipsticks than waving drumsticks. Only bassist Tom Petersson really looked and played the part of classic rocker, but who paid any attention to him?

June 1, 2010: 15 Amazing Uses of the Mellotron

Like the sitar or the Theremin, the Mellotron is an instrument with such a unique sound that contributed so integrally to the atmosphere of psychedelia that it has developed a cult as devoted as any that follow the various bands who dabbled in Mellotronia. And this is not limited to cult acts like The End, Tintern Abbey, and Family. Giants from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd worked this proto-synth into some of their best-loved creations.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Mellotron (and if that is the case…boy, have you stumbled across the wrong site!), the keyboard utilized analog tape loops of actual instruments, the most popular being flutes and orchestral strings. Artists often used the Mellotron as a substitute for pricey session musicians, although its wavering, ethereal tone has a charm that is quite distinct from any of the instruments it mimics. Here are 15 of the finest uses of the Mellotron in classic pop songs…

1. “Strawberry Fields Forever” by The Beatles (1967)