Review: The Black Crowes' 'Amorica' Vinyl Reissue

For a teenage Stones freak growing up amidst the stink of hair metal, such as myself, The Black Crowes seemed like a breath of fresh air. So what if their sound was completely recycled from scratched-up copies of Sticky Fingers and A Nod Is as Good as a Wink? So what if their best song was an Otis Redding cover? So what if they were yet another bunch of skinny white guys pushing an "I was stewed in blues" image? They didn't screech from lipsticked lips and Ibanezes. They used minimal amounts of Aquanet. And they clearly loved music.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus' Limited Deluxe Edition

1968 was a transitional year in which psychedelia gave way to the British Blues Boom, pop stars metamorphosed into rock stars, the sharp style of Swinging London frumped into patchwork hippie fashions, and the vitality and optimism of the sixties began slumping toward the seventies’ rude awakening. There is no better visual document of this brief yet pungent turning point than The Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus. To celebrate the release of Beggars Banquet, which critics love to paint as a big comeback album following a “misguided” foray into psychedelia, The Rolling Stones put together a rag-tag big-top show for the small screen featuring buddies such as Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull, and The Who, as well as a couple of circus acts.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 72

The Date: December 11

The Movie: The Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus (1968)

What Is It?: Divine unaired TV special finds the Stones hosting Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, Marianne Faithfull, a John Lennon supergroup, and—brace yourselves—The Who in a circus environment. The story goes that the special didn’t air during its time because The Who blew the Stones out of the ring. That’s true, but the Stones are still fabulous. Jagger never looked so beautifully panther-like.

Why Today?: On this day in 1968,  all those great bands got together to shoot this great concert film.

The Ten Best Old Albums That Were New to Psychobabble in 2010

I may purport myself to be some sort of authority on classic Rock & Roll, psych, pop, and punk records, but in reality, there are lots and lots and lots of them I’ve never heard. Nevertheless, I’m happy to say that I’m still discovering great old albums that are new to me, whether I’ve long heard about them but have yet to give them a spin or I’d never even been aware of their existences. Here are the ten finest retro-rock records that were new to me in 2010, presented in glorious chronological order...

1. We Are Ever So Clean by Blossom Toes (1967)



Having long read about We Are Ever So Clean, a real cult favorite of British psychedelia, I was a bit disappointed on first listen. “When the Alarm Clock Rings”, which concludes Rhino’s Nuggets II box set, was all I knew from Blossom Toes prior to hearing their only LP, so I was a bit taken off guard by how thoroughly daffy, and often cacophonous, it is. I’m glad I gave the record a number of additional spins. Now it sounds perfectly conceived, and that includes the more insane tracks, such as the borderline grating “The Remarkable Saga of the Frozen Dog” and “Look at Me I’m You”, which sounds like William Burroughs diced up the master tapes of Revolver, and reassembled them willy nilly. Still, the album’s best songs are its most straightforward. There’s the rousing “When the Alarm Clock Rings”, “I’ll Be Late For Tea”, a marvelous Kinks pastiche that fuses that band’s early heaviness with their mid-‘60s pastoralism, the groovy “Telegram Tuesday”, “What’s It For”, with its chugging cellos, and the Move-esque “I Will Bring You This and That”. Definitely the psychedelic find of the year.


2. Pandemonium Shadow Show by Harry Nilsson (1967)



I probably wouldn’t have given Harry Nilsson his fair shake if my friend and occasional collaborator Jeffrey Dinsmore hadn’t insisted I do so. I like “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Coconut” (more because it was used to great effect at the end of Reservoir Dogs than anything else) well enough, but “Daddy’s Song” and “Cuddly Toy” are not among my favorite Monkees songs and “Without You” makes me barf. Because Jeffrey was a former Nilsson skeptic, himself, I agreed to check out Pandemonium Shadow Show. This is a terrific vaudeville record, much closer in spirit to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band than a lot of records to which The Beatles’ album are often compared. Really, the predominant sound of Pepper’s is not psychedelia but old-timey music hall, so Pandemonium Shadow Show sounds much more Peppery than, say, Their Satanic Majesties Request. And not only did the Fabs inspire Nilsson, but he pays direct tribute to them when he covers “She’s Leaving Home” and cheekily mangles a variety of their songs in the hilarious mishmash “You Can’t Do That”. “River Deep, Mountain High” has been covered by too many people who aren’t Tina Turner, Nilsson’s version of “Cuddly Toy” is just marginally better than The Monkees’, and “Ten Little Indians” was neither a good song in the hands of its creator or The Yardbirds, who recorded the most famous rendition during their Jimmy Page period. The rest of the album is phenomenal though. “Sleep Late, My Lady Friend” is the lullaby Bacharach and David always wanted to write. Gil Garfield and Perry Botkin’s show-tuney “There Will Never Be” is an instant standard. Sparsely arranged with cello, bass, and flute, “Without Her” is a haunting melding of baroque and jazz balladry. The masterpiece of this collection is “1941”, an elegiac lament about Nilsson’s abandonment by his father (a recurring theme in his work that did not prevent him from pulling the same shit on his own first born). The album’s ultimate endorsement is that it won Nilsson a quartet of Liverpudlian super-fans, three of whom personally called him to tell him how much they loved his latest record.


3. The Natch’l Blues by Taj Mahal (1968)