Review: Two Judee Sill Reissues

There’s no question that Judee Sill’s back story is fascinating and disturbing. The biological daughter of a man who imported exotic animals for films, she emerged from a violent home life with a step dad who animated Tom and Jerry cartoons to become an armed robber, drug addict, prostitute, scam artist, and convict. Then she apparently discovered Jesus and became a recording artist.

While her lyrics take the occasional glimpse into the shadows (most fearlessly on “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown”), Sill’s first recordings fail to reflect her harrowing experiences. Her voice is full bodied and pitch perfect, but it does not exactly exude emotion, making her sound like she should be serenading kids on The Magic Garden and leaving folky compositions such as “Crayon Angels” and “Jesus Was a Cross-Maker” pleasant but not terribly moving. The religiousness of her lyrics won’t appeal to everyone either. Without a doubt the most striking song on Judee Sill is the heart-rending “Lady-O”, which The Turtles recorded with more acute emotion in 1969. These songs all appear on Sill’s 1971 self-titled debut co-produced by Graham Nash. The inoffensive acoustic arrangements are in line with Nash’s work with CSN’s softer songs. The Paul Buckmaster-esque string arrangement on “Lopin’ Along Through the Cosmos” is the one unquestionably potent ingredient in an otherwise bland stew.

On her second album, 1973’s Heart Food, Sill taps into her experiences more effectively with country-ish arrangements that place her work in that genre’s tradition of hard living. More of the grand string arrangements that were the highlights of Judee Sill prevent the Heart Food  from ever feeling like mere rural pastiche. Most importantly, Sill lets down her guard in front of the mic. The inherent quality of her voice is still very present, but by allowing it to droop into audible despair, to soar with intensity, to bend and even crack, she bridges the emotional gap that made her debut feel distant. The most explicitly religious thing here is an epic called “The Donor” yet it is so breath-taking that even we heathens can dig it. There’s nothing as recognizable as “Jesus Was a Cross-Maker” or “Lady-O” on Heart Food, but it is most definitely the superior album.

Intervention Records is now giving the only two records Judee Sill completed before her death in 1979 deluxe treatment with a new audiophile reissue that splits each album between two 180 gram, 45-rpm records. True to advertising, the vinyl is whisper quiet and the all-analog masters are exceptionally present and detailed. Some of the music is merely pretty but the presentation is consistently beautiful.

Review: Edsel Records' Deluxe Turtles Reissues

Although they scooped up a bundle of smash 45s such as “Elenore,” “You Showed Me”, “It Ain’t Me Babe”, and the deathless “Happy Together”, The Turtles never quite garnered the reputation for being a great album group as peers such as The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Monkees did. That’s too bad because The Turtles’ albums tended to be as effervescent, memorable, and weird as their singles. The LPs also really throw a spotlight on the odd ways a group most noted for their good-timey pop tunes evolved.

The 1965 debut, It Ain’t Me Babe, finds the L.A. sextet in total folk-rock mode, covering Dylan with almost as much enthusiasm as The Byrds did on their debut. The Turtles also shred through a couple of bitter treats by Dylan-aspirer P.F. Sloan and thoughtful originals by their own Howard Kaylan, such as “Wanderin’ Kind” and “Let the Cold Winds Blow”. While there are none of the gum drops that would soon come tumbling out of The Turtles’ shells, a jaunty version of “Your Maw Said You Cried” and the band’s decision to cover a tune by Tin Pan Alley team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil is an early clue that times would soon be changin’ for the less politicized.

Nevertheless, 1966’s You Baby/Let Me Be is still dominated by “Let Me Be” brooding rather than “You Baby” sugariness, offering another slew of withering folk rock, such as Kaylan’s “House of the Rising Sun”-esque “House of Pain” and Highway 61-esque “Pall Bearing, Ball Bearing World”. Even the love songs are pretty moody, and the upbeat “Flyin’ High” and the Kinky “Almost There” bookend the album with a fanged snarl. A version of Bob Lind’s “Down in Suburbia”, however, matches cute social commentary with a fun and funky Latin clatter, hinting at the clever strangeness to come.

Then came The Turtles’ breakthrough year, 1967, and the hits that really defined their career. “Happy Together” and “Me About You” are too moody to really categorize as bubblegum, but “She’d Rather Be with Me”, “Guide for the Married Man”, “Makin’ My Mind Up”, and “Person without a Care” deliver the Bazooka Joe goods in the best way. Happy Together is also where The Turtles started exploring their inner zany for good (“The Walking Song”) and ill (the unlistenable “Rugs of Woods and Flowers”).

Produced by one-time Turtle Chip Douglas, 1968’s The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands makes use of a concept that allows the band to indulge every idiosyncratic side of their personality with complete abandon. The album basically makes good on the supposed concept beneath Sgt. Pepper’s: The Turtles pretend to be a different band on each track, which allows them to show off how well they could mock soul combos (“The Battle of the Bands”), psych groups (“The Last Thing I Remember”), corny C&W pickers (“Too Much Heartsick Feeling”), surf bands (“Surfer Dan”), jazz fusionists (“Food”), Booker T. & The MG’s (“Buzz Saw”), errr…world music? (“I’m Chief Kamanawanalea”), and themselves (“Elenore”). A rare flash of sincerity called “Earth Anthem” reveals that the Turtles still cared about their world, could create work of tremendous beauty, and were rather prescient in their ability to foresee the coming environmental movement of the seventies. Anyone baffled by how the guys who sang “Happy Together” ended up working with Frank Zappa should listen to Battle of the Bands pronto.

Unlike The Turtles’ previous hit-packed albums, Turtle Soup failed to spawn a significant single. This is significant because it also marks The Turtles’ complete maturation as an album group. Blame Ray Davies, whom the band hired to produce in the vein of The Kinks’ raucous early singles. However, Davies had just completed his masterpiece, the textured and sensitive Village Green Preservation Society, and decided to continue with that approach while also taking advantage of resources available to a band that sold a lot more records in 1968 than The Kinks did. The results were such Wagnerian production feats as “Love in the City” and “How You Loved Me”, as well as the more elegantly orchestrated “John and Julie”. Relatively simple productions, such as the ’66-style jangle of “She Always Leaves Me Laughing”, the stripped down boogie of “Hot Little Hands”, and the “Happy Together”-revisited arrangement of “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain” were just as effective. As far as I’m concerned, Turtle Soup is not just the best Turtles album but also one of the very best of 1969, and I’d sooner spin it than such acknowledged classics of that year as Led Zeppelin’s debut, Let It Bleed, and The Kinks’ own Arthur.

If you’ve yet to discover the hidden wonders of Turtle Soup and the rest of The Turtles’ long-playing catalog, you’d do no better than starting with Edsel’s new reissue series. Utilizing Bill Inglot’s same warm and detailed remasters that graced Manifesto’s Complete Original Album Collection released in the U.S. last year, Edsel’s new individual releases split the mono and stereo mixes of the first three albums between two discs each (don’t bother popping in the stereo It Ain’t Me Babe disc unless you have a high tolerance for vocals hard panned to the left and instruments hard panned to the right).  The second discs of Battle of the Bands, Turtle Soup, and the collection of 1966 outtakes Wooden Head load up on stereo mixes of non-album singles (the mono originals were collected on last year’s superb All the Singles), Turtle Soup demos, some fabulous psychedelic outtakes cut around the same time as “Sound Asleep”, and a fascinating and characteristically unsettling half-dozen Jerry Yester productions recorded for the band’s scrapped 1970 LP to be titled Shell Shock (judging from these tracks, it would have been a great record). The nice digipak packaging and Andrew Sandoval’s short but sweet liner notes help give these excellent albums the respect they should have been receiving for the past fifty years.

Review: 'The Turtles: All the Singles'

The Turtles’ albums were good enough that it’s more than a little dismissive to stripe them as nothing but a singles band, but the band really did have a unique life on 45. It was not just a medium for them to rack up hits with the likes of “Happy Together”, “You Baby”, “She’d Rather Be With Me”, “Elenore”, and “You Showed Me”. It also allowed them to totally unfurl their freak flags as they took advantage of the B-sides to get really weird with things like the jungle movie tone poem “Umbassa the Dragon”, the asininely crooned “Rugs of Woods and Flowers”, and “Can’t You Hear the Cows?” Some of their less bizarre flips—“Chicken Little Was Right”, “Almost There”, “Come Over”—were every bit as good as the hits.

Since a lot of these songs did not appear on the LPs, a collection like The Turtles: All the Singles is necessary. Remember that some of The Turtles’ very best A-sides, such as the seething and jangling “Outside Chance”, the eerie and seductive “She’s My Girl”, and the unbelievably lovely “Lady-O”, weren’t on LPs. Sure, these songs appear on any “Greatest Hits” package worth its salt, but such collections won’t contain those bizarre flip-sides or such delectable oddities as the holiday single “Christmas Is My Time of Year” (covered by the reunited Monkees in 1976), the posthumous single “Why Would You Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret?”, or a wealth of Turtle Soup tracks in mono. Plus, the liner notes with ample comments from the band are fab.

Psychobabble Hall of Fame to Open in Cleveland!

Breaking news! After an as-yet unidentified Cleveland museum was accidentally demolished by a slightly moist fart, city officials agreed it would be idiotic to rebuild it, instead deciding to replace that as-yet unidentified museum with a new one called the Psychobabble Hall of Fame! 

All artists are eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record. At least one non-shitty contribution to Rock & Roll history is the sole criteria for induction. The ability to apply clown makeup will not be a consideration for induction.

Proposed Museum Design.

Breaking update! The list of inductees has just been announced! It is as follows:

Paul Revere and the Raiders

Outstanding Contribution: Can play brutal bubblegum garage rock while doing choreographed dance moves in American Revolutionary War costumes.
Most Outstanding Work:  The Spirit of '67 (1966)

The Zombies

Outstanding Contribution: Crafted ethereally jazzy pop and masterful, Mellotrony psychedelia. Responsible for the current zombie craze.
Most Outstanding  Work: Odessey and Oracle (1968)

The Pretty Things

Outstanding Contribution: Recorded and released the very first LP length-rock opera. Wore the very first 1970s-length long hair. Rocked terribly hard.
Most Outstanding  Work: S.F. Sorrow (1968)

The Turtles

Outstanding Contribution: Racked up hits by recording consistently wonderful bubblegum folk rock with an emphasis on beautifully stoned harmonies and wise-ass humor.
Most Outstanding  Work: Turtle Soup (1969)

Nico

Outstanding Contribution: Metamorphosed from gorgeous, icy voiced pop chanteuse into ghoulish, icy voiced goth princess. Was the scariest thing about The Velvet Underground, which is saying a hell of a lot.
Most Outstanding  Work: The Marble Index (1968)

Love

Outstanding Contribution: One of the few integrated rock groups of the sixties made a totally new sound with each album, and each one was fabulous. Were LA's coolest underground band, and Arthur Lee could shout as well as he could coo.
Most Outstanding  Work: Forever Changes (1967)
 
The Monkees

Outstanding Contribution: Started as a totally manufactured sitcom pop band, said "Fuck that!" and threatened their record company until they were allowed to be one of the greatest real bands of the sixties. Were pretty awesome even before that. Hated by Jann Wenner, which is practically instant credibility.
Most Outstanding  Work: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd. (1967)

The Left Banke 

Outstanding Contribution: Single-handedly invented mopey British pop. Were from New York City.
Most Outstanding  Work: Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina (1967)

The Creation 

Outstanding Contribution: Parodied art by setting canvasses on fire on stage. Taught Jimmy Page how to bow a guitar. "Making Time"? Holy shit!
Most Outstanding  Work: We Are Paintermen (1967)

The Move

Outstanding Contribution: Ripped out hilarious power pop, power bubble gum, and power prog rock, often while smashing used cars with sledgehammers. Kept Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne out of trouble.
Most Outstanding  Work: Move (1968)

Procol Harum 

Outstanding Contribution: Invented goth rock even though everyone insists on primarily categorizing them as prog rockers. When they did play prog, Gary Brooker's voice made it soulful prog. Revolutionized the double-keyboard approach. Made their non-singing, non-instrument playing lyricist an official member of the band, which is very considerate. Occasionally wore Merlin costumes.
Most Outstanding  Work: A Salty Dog (1969)

Nazz

Outstanding Contribution: American rockers who kept the concise spirit of '65/'66 British pop alive during the long-winded, jammy late sixties. Were the first thing on Todd Rundgren's resumé.
Most Outstanding  Work: Nazz (1968)


Nick Drake

Outstanding Contribution: Was the king of morbid, introverted singer-songwriters. Made three perfect yet distinct albums.
Most Outstanding  Work: Bryter Layter (1970)

Yes

Outstanding Contribution: Fused Beatlesque pop with prog pretensions. Jon Anderson sang lyrics that didn't even make sense when you were tripping your butthole off. Pissed off your super dogmatic punk buddies.
Most Outstanding  Work: Fragile (1971)

King Crimson

Outstanding Contribution: Are the only prog band you're not embarrassed to keep in your record collection. Robert Fripp did incredibly beautiful things with heavily distorted electric guitar and  incredibly heavy things with the beautiful Mellotron.
Most Outstanding  Work: In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

Big Star

Outstanding Contribution: For those with no space in their hearts for prog, Big Star were the early-seventies saviors of power pop. But only critics knew that.
Most Outstanding  Work: #1 Record (1972)

Pete Townshend

Outstanding Contribution: Already inducted in old museum as member of The Who, deserves to be inducted in new one for making better solo albums than any other member of a major band and better demo recordings than God.
Most Outstanding  Work: Empty Glass (1980)

The Damned 

Outstanding Contribution: Punk, pop, psych, goth, garage rock, prog. They mastered it all without losing their sense of humor. Made the first punk single and the first punk album and toured the states before any of their British brethren. Outlasted about a million break ups and all the asshole critics who said they'd never last.
Most Outstanding  Work: Machine Gun Etiquette (1979)

The Jam

Outstanding Contribution: Introduced sharp mod style and twelve-string Rickenbackers to seventies punk rock. Made eighties new wave honest and organic even if no one else did.
Most Outstanding  Work: All Mod Cons (1978)

Cheap Trick 

Outstanding Contribution: Were the only traditional Rock & Roll band that mattered during the late seventies punk revolution. Their lyrics were as funny as their two heartthrobs/two slobs image.
Most Outstanding  Work: Cheap Trick (1977)

The Cure

Outstanding Contribution: Made the most thrillingly bi-polar music in rock history. Reinvented the dirge. Reinvented grooming.
Most Outstanding  Work: Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)

Siouxsie and the Banshees

Outstanding Contribution: Transformed punk rock into avant garde art, transformed the Gothic into the delectably poppy, transformed millions of perfectly nice high school girls into wild-haired, wild-makeupped mini-Siouxsie Siouxs (note: just to confirm, Siouxsie's outstanding ability to apply clown makeup was not a consideration in her induction).
Most Outstanding  Work: A Kiss in the Dream House (1982)

XTC

Outstanding Contribution: Made the best hurky-jerky new wave since Talking Heads and the best Beatles and Beach Boys albums since The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
Most Outstanding  Work: Black Sea (1980)

The Replacements

Outstanding Contribution: Were too crazy to contain, too beautiful to ignore, too drunk to keep it together, and too cool for that other hall of fame.
Most Outstanding  Work: Let It Be (1984)

The Smiths

Outstanding Contribution: Made gloriously shimmering pop for mopey kids who didn't quite understand that Morrissey is really, really, really funny.
Most Outstanding  Work: The Smiths (1984)

Suzanne Vega

Outstanding Contribution: Most often stereotyped as a folk singer, the New York singer-songwriter actually reinvented herself as regularly and audaciously as David Bowie. Possibly the only pop artist to dabble in industrial music without making a fool of herself.
Most Outstanding  Work: 99.9F° (1992) 

Throwing Muses 

Outstanding Contribution: Were the scariest thing ever to come out of Rhode Island. Had the most stellar rhythm section in college rock history and a front woman with a voice that could melt your face faster than the Ark of the Covenant.
Most Outstanding  Work: The Real Ramona (1991)

Guided by Voices

Outstanding Contribution: Made it OK to be a lo-fi, middle-aged, self-made Rock & Roll superstar. Literally released 6,000 albums, including a slick, hi-fi one produced by Rik Ocasek that is amazingly awesome despite what everyone says.
Most Outstanding  Work: Bee Thousand (1994)

The Pixies

Outstanding Contribution: Have you ever heard nineties rock? They're responsible for that.
Most Outstanding  Work: Doolittle (1989)

Nirvana

Outstanding Contribution: Revitalized Rock & Roll after the "hair metal" years. Were the last truly culture-crossing, globally important band of the Rock & Roll era. Only band of previous museum's recent inductees deemed worthy of inclusion in the Psychobabble Hall of Fame.
Most Outstanding  Work: In Utero (1994)

August 19, 2009: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: The Turtles

The Turtles are probably the most high-profile group included on the first Nuggets box set. Of course, they aren’t represented by any of their ubiquitous mega-hits like “Happy Together” or “Elenore”, both of which would be undeniably out of place amongst the punky garage rock on Nuggets. Their rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Outside Chance” fits in splendidly, though. It’s a short, sharp blast of driving, riffy Rock & Roll and a neat indicator of how diverse the Turtles could be. They are primarily known as purveyors of schlocky pop like the two hits mentioned above, but during their brief record-making career (1965-1969) they recorded five eclectic albums, each one worth owning. But where to start? Where to start? Relax… answering this question is the point of the Nuggets Record Buying Guide.



The obvious launching point may seem to be Happy Together/She’d Rather Me with Me (1967). It boasts the Turtles’ two biggest hits (as indicated by its painfully unimaginative title) and a couple of popular misses (the slow-burning “Me About You”; “Guide for the Married Man”, the title song from a Walter Matthau vehicle). Happy Together is not the Turtles’ strongest album, though. Some of the cuts are fairly non-descript, and the idiotically sung “Rugs of Wood and Flowers” is unlistenable. Even a couple of the more well-known cuts aren’t must-haves: “Happy Together” has been murdered by over-exposure and “Guide for the Married Man” sounds as disposable as most pop movie themes were in the mid-‘60s. You don’t want to be without “Me About You”, “She’d Rather Be With Me”, and some of the stronger album cuts (particularly “The Walking Song” and “Too Young to Be One”), but this record should be placed on the back burner for a bit. Same goes for The Turtles Present the Battles of the Bands (1968), which also contains a pair of huge hits (“Elenore” and “You Showed Me”), but there are too many goofy comedy tracks flanking them (the album’s conceit finds the band impersonating various groups in various genres, Sgt. Pepper-style). Again, there are some great songs here (“You Showed Me” is one of the Turtles’ best hit singles), but it’s pretty spotty overall.



The real launching point for a Turtles-habit is their final album. Turtle Soup (1969) does not include a single hit, but considering that plenty of listeners never took the Turtles’ hits very seriously, this is not a hindrance. The Turtles were so enamored with The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) that they nabbed Ray Davies to produce Turtle Soup, and the album shares the spare-but-intricate instrumentation that helped make VGPS an album that can be listened to over and over without being heard the same way twice. Also like Village Green, Turtle Soup covers a number of musical styles but remains unified by its production. There’s some ecstatic jangle-pop (“She Always Leaves Me Laughing”), Lovin’ Spoonful-style good timin’ (the May/December love song “Bachelor Mother”), delirious Rock & Roll ( “Hot Little Hands”), baroque pop (the beautiful “John and Julie”), a country-fried waltz (“Dance This Dance”), spooky mysterioso psych (“Somewhere Friday Night”), a Wagnerian pocket symphony (“Love in the City”), and a fabulous variation on the quiet-LOUD-quiet recipe that made a hit of “Happy Together” (“You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain”). Perhaps out of respect for their guest producer, the band turned in their most serious roster of tunes. There isn’t a “Rugs of Wood and Flowers” in the bunch, and after the hit-and-miss comedy of The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, this more serious direction is welcome. There are still moments of humor on Turtle Soup (most notably the sex-crazed “Hot Little Hands”), but there aren’t any of the silly pastiches or jokey performances that made some of their previous records lopsided. Impressively, Turtle Soup is also the Turtles’ only album to not contain a single song written by an outside composer, and each member of the group contributes both compositions and lead vocals.
Next, you might want to check out the Turtles second album, another lazily titled platter called You Baby/Let Me Be (1966). It’s a transitional record, finding the Turtles with one foot in the Byrdsy folk-rock of their debut (It Ain’t Me Babe [1965]) and one in the bubble gum of future hits like “She’d Rather Be with Me”. Both styles are evidenced in the two hits for which the album was named, but the record also has some gutsy garage rock (“Flyin’ High”; “Pall Bearing Ball Bearing World”) and blues (“House of Pain”), and a funny rumba (“Suburbia”). It Ain’t Me Babe is almost as good. The Turtles’ cover of “Like a Rolling Stone” is unnecessary (especially in light of the two superior Dylan covers with which it shares vinyl space), but their versions of P.F. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction”, “Your Maw Said You Cried” (later covered by Robert Plant), and “Glitter and Gold” (covered by the amazing Canadian group Sloan in the ‘90s) are essential.

April 12, 2010: 10 Great Dylan Versions That Aren’t by The Byrds

When The Byrds released their beat version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” 45 years ago today, they established a tradition of radical interpretations of Bob Dylan’s music. Dylan songs were ripe for such imaginative tinkering because they are melodic yet fluid in form. One doesn’t necessarily miss the multitude of verses McGuinn and the gang excised from “Mr. Tambourine Man”—a veritable epic poem on Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home—because the band restructured it to the point where it nearly became a different song. Dylan’s arrangement is Spartan: voice, two guitars, and harmonica. The Byrds’: ringing twelve-string Rickenbacker, swooping bass, a rock-steady backbeat, and velveteen vocal harmonies. In their hands, “Mr. Tambourine Man” became an entirely different animal incomparable to the original. The Byrds’ version did not beat Dylan’s, and vice versa. Both are perfectly wonderful for their own reasons. Compare that to any cover of, say, the Beatles, which will invariably be inferior to the original because The Beatles’ songs are so inseparable from George Martin’s brilliantly definitive productions. Before going whole-hog electric (Dylan only cut half of Bringing It All Back Home with a band), he recorded in true troubadour tradition, allowing his work to be as interpretable as “Greensleeves” or any other folk standard.