Review: 'Alternative Anthems' LP

The alternative scene feels like the great forgotten era in rock history. Although it was the most potent period in my own "coming of age"--the only rock movement I fully embraced as it was happening (although I lived through the new wave era, I didn't fully appreciate it until the eighties were a fart in the breeze), there are scant references to it today. There are no jukebox musicals that feature the songs of Pavement, no Belly biopic. They won't even put the goddamn Pixies into the idiotic Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, even though nineties rock would have been nowhere without their influence. 

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)

Review : ‘The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History'

OK, so Paul Westerberg was an exceptional songwriter, but it’s hard to read Jim Walsh’s oral history The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting without thinking the moral of the story is that anyone can play Rock & Roll. The ‘Mats were a people’s band who pursued fame with one hand and scorned it with the other, a sloppy drunk quartet of Minneapolis dirtbags who won a following because they were unpredictable, outrageous, loutish, insane. That Westerberg emerged as a tremendous power-pop composer in the tradition of Pete Townshend, Alex Chilton, and Rick Nielsen was beside the point.

That combination of stage infamy—Westerberg deciding the band would eschew their greatest hits in favor of appalling Chuck Berry covers, Bob Stinson lifting his skirt to present his balls to the audience, teen brother Tommy Stinson dropping jaws simply for being so fucking young—and spectacularly ragged records made The Replacements cult heroes. They could get prestigious opening tour slots for Keith Richards and Tom Petty but couldn’t bring themselves to appear in anything as crass as a music video. A pal of the band from way back when, Walsh drew together a cast of nearly 150 friends, family members, fans, and fellow Minnesotans to tell this often hilarious, often harrowing, often exhilarating tale. The band members are mostly represented by a trove of quotes from old interviews.



On paper, The Replacements story is not much different from any other band’s: they rose from middle-class ennui to enjoy a degree of popularity, engaged in heated Rock & Roll rivalries with other local groups (particularly Hüsker Dü), over-indulged in a variety of substances, and didn’t all live to tell the tale. The big differences are the vehemence with which they refused to play the Rock & Roll success game, the respect and loathing they earned (famed asshole Steve Albini often had choice words for the guys), and their confounding paradoxical status as ordinary legends. Punks like Joe Strummer, Johnny Rotten, and even Joey Ramone were larger than life, either as cartoon characters or political way-lighters. The Replacements were the cretins demolishing classic Rock & Roll tunes in the garage next door, and like Spinal Tap’s keyboardist, they just wanted to have a good time all the time, often at the expense of their fans, their critics, and themselves. They weren’t gods. They were me and they were you. You can’t say that about many Rock stars, can you?

Anyone who loves The Replacements has no excuse for not reading All Over But the Shouting. Hell, anyone who loves Rock & Roll has no excuse either. I’ve been reading a lot of Rock & Roll books lately, and this is the first one I’ve read in a long, long time that made me want to join a band, get stinking drunk, and moon a room full of gawkers. Any takers?

Psychobabble’s Ten Greatest Singles of 1985

The music scene had gotten pretty rough by 1985. Top-notch artists like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Rolling Stones, and Stevie Wonder were making the most appalling music of their respective careers, while Foreigner, Chicago, REO Speedwagon, and USA for Africa were otherwise shitting up the charts. Yet, as in every year since the dawn of Rock & Roll, great singles could still be detected amid the muck. Here are ten…



10. “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements

With Tim the constrictions of ‘80s pop production started to have their way with The Replacements, who had recently made the leap from small time Twin/Tone records to bigger time Sire. Well, you can gate Chris Mars’s drums all you like and you can shoot a spiffy MTV-ready music video (and the accompanying video was mighty spiffy), but you can never tame Westerberg’s whiskey yowl. It is in furious form on “Bastards of Young”, perhaps the most insightful teen anthem of the ‘80s.


9. “So Far Away”by Dire Straits

Some seven years had past since square British Blues combo Dire Straits had a hit in the US. As we all know, that changed most assuredly when they dropped the ultra-slick, DDD monster Brothers in Arms in ’85. That year you couldn’t blow your nose without having “Money for Nothing” blare out of your nostrils. However the truly great single from the band’s comeback triumph was its first. “So Far Away” barely sneaked into the top twenty, but it’s as hooky and alluring as anything Dire Straights ever did, their taut rhythm section pulsing beneath an utterly sublime guitar lick. Mark Knopfler’s six-string impersonates a Hawaiian pedal steel and fools me completely.

8. “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

December 1, 2009: Psychobabble’s 11 Greatest Singles of 1984

As the year winds down, Psychobabble sweeps up the debris of 2009’s anniversary-related nostalgia. So, let us venture back 25 years, pull on our stonewashed nut huggers, follow Ronald Reagan’s lead by turning a blind eye to the mounting AIDS epidemic, and take a listen to 11 tubular singles that probably wouldn’t pass muster with Tipper Gore’s newly established Parents’ Music Resource Coalition. These are Psychobabble’s 11 Greatest Singles of 1984!

11. “Sunspots” by Julian Cope

An authoritative guitar lick launches this weighty slab of neo-psychedelia by former Teardrop Explodes frontman, Julian Cope. The song is utterly infectious because of (rather than in spite of) an awkwardly lumbering rhythm, although Cope’s wacky ejaculations of “Meeeeeeeeow!” don’t hurt.

10. “The Caterpillar” by The Cure

The Cure set their flanged guitars aside to deliver a wonderfully weird bit of rustic psychedelia that would have stirred Syd Barrett’s envy. Drums beat a tribal rhythm, acoustic guitars chime, fingers skitter up and down a piano keyboard like the many legs of the title critter, a fiddle flutters, and Robert Smith flickers.

9. “She Told Me Lies” by The Chesterfield Kings