Track by Track: 'Spook Along with Zacherley'

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

Like most American families, mine spent Christmas with the usual choir of vinyl carolers: Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole, and since my dad loved Rock & Roll as much as I do, Phil Spector’s stable of stars. Most American homes, however, had no annual carols for my favorite holiday. Mine did though. As soon as my mom had affixed the final cardboard jack-o-lantern to the living room windows, I was begging my dad to take his yearly trip down to the basement and brush the cobwebs off an old record called Spook Along with Zacherley.

Track by Track: 'A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records'

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

“The biggest thanks goes to you for giving me the opportunity to relate my feelings of Christmas through the music that I love.”

-Phil Spector “Silent Night”

Like so many visionaries, Phil Spector refused to grow up. Perhaps this has been the cause of so many of his problems—his infantilizing of ex-wife Ronnie Spector, his daddy issues, and his fatal obsession with playing with guns—but it is also the source of his art. His favorite toys are the ones found in a recording studio and his favorite time of the year is Christmas. In 1963, Spector attempted to capture the essence of the holiday several months before December 25^th in the less than seasonal setting of sunny Los Angeles’ Gold Star Studios. How would his thunderous Wall-of-Sound work with corny kiddie songs like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman” or the hymn carol “Silent Night” or the easy-listening standard “Winter Wonderland”? Brilliantly, of course, though it has taken longer than Spector surely wished for this to become common knowledge.

Track by Track: 'Something Else by The Kinks'

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

Welcome to Daviesland, a kurious little nook of England where The Kinks secreted themselves some two years after being unofficially banned from touring the United States. Since that unfortunate event, in which Ray socked an insult-spewing musician’s union representative, the boys enjoyed a steady string of top ten hits in their homeland, but only managed to sneak into the U.S. top twenty twice with “A Well Respected Man” and “Sunny Afternoon”. 

Track by Track: ‘A Quick One’ by The Who

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

As was their way, The Who entered 1966 in a cyclone of tumult. They’d recently sacked Shel Talmy, the American producer who clamored up their first L.P., My Generation. The split was acrimonious, and the contract dissolution left Talmy with a 5% piece of The Who’s pie for the next five years. Dissent was also strong in the band itself. Roger Daltrey’s frustration with a group that had long since slipped out of his control brewed violence. Sick of taking the occasional thumping from their thuggish singer, the other guys and manager Kit Lambert asked Roger to quit. Afraid of losing a good thing, he resolved to be “Peaceful Perce” from then on. But violence still loomed in The Who’s ranks. In May of 1966, Pete Townshend wacked Keith Moon with his guitar when the drummer showed up late to a gig. As The Who played their next few shows with a stand-in, Moon convalesced and schemed to steal away bassist John Entwistle to form a new group with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page called Lead Zeppelin.

Track by Track: ‘Ramones’ by The Ramones

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

By 1976, Rock & Roll was in dire shape. The best work of the genre’s old guard—The Who, The Stones, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Dylan, The ex-Beatles—was behind them. Pretentious prog rockers clogged arenas with their endless bluster. Crushingly dull soft poppers polluted the top twenty with “Dream Weaver” and “Let Your Love Flow”. Then up from the underground swooped a quartet of troglodyte supermen from Queens, wearing matching rags, sporting matching mop tops and matching names. Like John, Paul, George, and Ringo 15 years before them, and Kurt, Krist, and Dave 15 years after, Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy did not set out to rescue Rock & Roll. They were just righteously fed up with the noodling, pomp, and wimpiness pervading the scene and decided to play the kind of Spartan garage rock they dug.


As bassist, chief composer, and chief wack-a-doo Dee Dee Ramone was heard to crow, “I think Rock & Roll should be three words and a chorus, and the three words should be good enough to say it all.” This was barely exaggeration. The Ramones stripped away all of Rock & Roll’s pretenses that had accumulated since Sgt. Pepper’s. No guitar solos; just fun. All tracks kick off in simultaneous fury (“1, 2, 3, 4!”), all have sing-songy choruses. Some are nothing but choruses.

Although The Ramones are famous— and were initially criticized— for their simplicity, Johnny Ramones’s neck-breaking down strokes require tremendous stamina and precision, as does the drumming of Tommy Ramone, who learned the instrument simply because the group he helped assemble needed a drummer. Speed, simplicity, catchiness, thunder. This music The Ramones invented wasn’t called punk yet, but it would be soon enough.

The Ramones didn’t just sound like the psychedelic era had never happened; they looked it too. Their jeans, leather jackets, Converse One Stars, and T-shirts could have been stripped off a ‘50s greaser. Johnny and Dee Dee's bowl cuts were strictly pre-psych Beatles.

Like John Waters, The Ramones collected the raw refuse of trash culture and defiant bad taste and molded it all into a monumental new art form. Horror movies, junk food, comic books, amusement parks, makeshift drugs, turning tricks, boneheaded agit prop, and sleazy violence all became pop fodder. Also like Waters, The Ramones paid tribute to a crime ridden, scuzzy city. What Baltimore was to the filthiest man alive, New York City was to the scuzziest band on the planet. Their debut album simply stinks of the city. Aside from the infamous “53rd and 3rd”, specific references are sparer here than they would be on subsequent records on which they’d praise Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, and the like. But Ramones sounds like New York. The grinding gears of a subway train. The quick snick of a switchblade. The expletive shout of a passing cabby. The wicked giggle of a purse snatcher. These sounds fester between the lines of all 14 tracks that comprise the only record that mattered in 1976. And it couldn’t have been cut in a more appropriate place: Plaza Sound studio in Manhattan’s landmark Radio City Music Hall. The track line up was merely transposed from their set list at CBGB’s, the Bowery scum pit that spawned all of the American bands that would rearrange Rock & Roll’s face over the next few years. But without Television’s pretty flourishes, Talking Heads’ art school angularity, Blondie’s radio-ready polish, Suicide’s electro freakiness, The Dead Boy’s cock-rock strut, or Patti Smith and Richard Hell’s Bowery poetry, The Ramones embodied New York Punk’s essence the best.

The group cut Ramones for just $6,400 over the course of 17 days. Johnny spent fifty bucks on the Mosrite guitar he played on it. It all sounded equally cheap. On subsequent albums, The Ramones sound opened up a bit, becoming less murky, less compressed… and losing some of its otherworldly magic in the process. Produced by novices Tommy Ramone and Craig Leon of Sire Records, Ramones sounds like it was belched up from Rock & Roll’s primordial muck.

Brace yourself.


Ramones by The Ramones
Originally released April 1976 on Sire Records
Produced by Craig Leon and Tommy Ramone
All songs credited to The Ramones.

Track 1: Blitzkrieg Bop

No opening guitar lick. No opening drum beat to ease the listener into the onslaught. Everything pounding out in simultaneous, militaristic fury. The first track on the first real punk LP defines the genre as well as anything that would follow. No New York Dolls swagger. No Stooges windiness. No Modern Lovers cleverness. It’s grooveless, it’s short, and it is dumb. “Blitzkrieg Bop” is also

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?

February 8, 2010: Track by Track: ‘Psonic Psunspot’ by The Dukes of Stratosphear

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.

The mid-1980s: a barren wasteland of antiseptic record production distinguished by harsh, gated drum sounds, tinny horns, and synthesizers. Aside from the most lo-fi college bands, no one came out unscathed. Elvis Costello and the Attractions put out Goodbye Cruel World (1984), a record that kicks off with a Darryl Hall duet complete with farty sax solo. The Damned also got saxy on Phantasmagoria (1985), their over-polished, synth-swathed bid for big chart success. Even the filthy Replacements broke out some flatly recorded horns on the otherwise fierce Pleased to Meet Me (1987). The real tragedy of such records is that they often contained a good deal of excellent songs that could have really shined in a different setting. But labels remained convinced that their acts had to delve into DDD flawlessness in order to compete with the soulless likes of Phil Collins and Duran Duran. Consequently, ‘60s holdovers like The Stones, The Kinks, Pete Townshend, and Robert Plant were among the worst offenders, probably because they had to struggle the hardest to remain relevant.

Some of the cagier groups skirted contemporary production trends by releasing one-off, “novelty” records credited to some long-lost, fabricated ‘60s band. They put together collections of organic, Retro-Rock that stood in warm contrast to the icy sounds of the day. In 1984, The Damned masqueraded as Naz Nomad and The Nightmares to release Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy, a phony soundtrack to a phony Roger Corman-esque psychedelic horror movie containing gritty covers of American psych and garage classic such as The Human Beinz’s “Nobody But Me”, Paul Revere and The Raiders’ “Kicks”, and The Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)”. It wasn’t anything incredibly essential; just a fresh palette-cleansing before they mounted Phantasmagoria.

XTC never succumbed to the trappings of ‘80s production as severely as many of their contemporaries, but an album like Skylarking (1986) still displayed a slightly off-putting sheen—though one that could not significantly spoil its uniformly excellent songs. But the ‘60s-psych-enthusiasts yearned for that era’s “compact magic” (in guitarist/singer/chief composer Andy Partridge’s words) enough to feel the need to retreat into their own pseudonymous project. Thus, Partridge transformed into “Sir John Johns”, bassist/singer Colin Moulding was now “The Red Curtain”, keyboardist Dave Gregory became “Lord Cornelius Plum”, and drummer Ian Gregory, “E.I.E.I. Owen”, and XTC was reborn as The Dukes of Stratosphear.

Upon the re-release of the entire Dukes output in May 2009, Andy Partridge told The Chicago Tribune “these days you’d just lean on a button, and there it is; it’s all sampled and pre-screwed-up for you. But then you really would have to play an electric saw at the bottom of a well and then have that spun in backwards and stuff like that.” He could have said the very same thing in 1985 when The Dukes of Stratosphear were conceived and digital effects made anything possible, and quite easily achieved, in the studio, but lacked the naturalness, the opportunity for magical accidents, that the whimsical, experimental techniques of the past allowed.

Unlike The Damned/Naz Nomad, XTC/The Dukes of Stratosphear composed original music, making their ruse a bit more convincing and a lot more artistically significant. In fact, the records XTC released as The Dukes of Stratosphear rate as some of the best music they produced and probably the most successful and accurate homage to ‘60s psychedelia ever recorded. Today Partridge considers Psonic Psunspot to be an official XTC L.P., serving as the missing link between Skylarking and Oranges and Lemons (1989), and credits the entire Dukes project with refreshing XTC’s creatively by giving them the “excuse to dress up crazy and not be (ourselves).”




The Dukes’ first release, the 1985 E.P. 25 O’Clock, puts a very fine point on their intentions, with each song serving as a specific take-off on a specific classic of the original psychedelic era. “25 O’Clock” is a ringer for “I Had To Much To Dream”, “Bike Ride to the Moon” is a poppier rewrite of Pink Floyd’s “Bike”, and “The Mole from the Ministry” not only sounds like The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”, but its fabulous music video reinterprets the “Walrus” sequence from Magical Mystery Tour. Such specificity makes 25 O’Clock sound a bit too much like a Rutles-style novelty (albeit a superb novelty). The Dukes of Stratosphear relaxed a bit on their one and only L.P. With Psonic Psunspot, they crafted a neo-psychedelic classic that still pays all-due tribute to Floyd, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, and other behemoths of the mid ‘60s, while still sounding quite like XTC (by this point, they’d fessed up about The Dukes’ true identity). By parading out all the essential tropes of psychedelia—satires of the military and straight society, drug songs, music hall, backward tape loops, Mellotrons, ostentatious surrealism, half-baked conceptual devices—XTC essentially create the ultimate album of 1967 twenty years after the fact.

Psonic Psunspot by The Dukes of Stratosphear
Originally released August 1987 on Virgin Records
Produced by The Dukes of Stratosphear
All songs by Andy Partridge unless otherwise stated.

*blue-highlighted song titles are links to audio clips

Track 1: Vanishing Girl (Colin Moulding)

Normally, comparing a band’s work to another’s is an all-too easy Rock criticism cop-out. However, a self-conscious homage like Psonic Spunspot cannot be considered without acknowledging its various influences. Critics often cite the exhilarating “Vanishing Girl” as The Dukes’ homage to the sweet, jangly pop of The Hollies. Drawing inspiration from one of the less psychedelic acts referenced on the album, “Vanishing Girl” is its most straight-forward track, and hearing The Dukes this naked would have ensured their

January 25, 2010: Track by Track: ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ by The Rolling Stones

In this new 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.

For the first installment of Track by Track, I’ve chosen The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, probably the most controversial and misunderstood album the guys ever released. Largely dismissed as a misguided Sgt. Pepper’s rip-off that betrayed The Stones’ blues and basic Rock & Roll reputation, Their Satanic Majesties Request is undeniably symptomatic of Mick Jagger’s yen for trend-hopping, yet I personally find it to be a far more intriguing and complex album than Pepper. As we’ll see, there is still a great deal of blues and basic Rock & Roll beneath the Mellotrons, strings, horns, synthesizers, sitars, bells, and whistles of Their Satanic Majesties Request, and The Stones hardly relinquished their trademark nihilism in favor of flower-power platitudes. Rather they cagily adapted their established sound to psychedelia, injecting bluesy elements into the Moroccan-influenced jams, vaudevillian larks, space rock excursions, and baroque ballads that dominate the album. Not everything is completely successful, but it’s all interesting and greatly deserving of reassessment by any listener who isn’t too blinkered to accept The Stones attempting anything other than unadorned blues and Rock & Roll.

Today The Rolling Stones tend to speak of Their Satanic Majesties Request through embarrassed smirks, justifying it by saying that no one can work outside of the zeitgeist (Dylan didn’t seem to have a problem with that, though). But had the album not received such a pitiless critical drubbing you can bet your ass that the band would have embraced it with greater enthusiasm. Instead they all seem to have a rather ambivalent relationship with Satanic. In 1972, Mick Jagger told the New Musical Express, “At the time I kinda liked the album, and then I went through a period when I really hated it. Now I find that it’s good to listen to.” Just two years later, he would say, “I’m rather fond of that album, and I wouldn’t mind doing something like that again.” In the interim, 1973's Goat’s Head Soup contained a track called “Can You Hear the Music”, which sounds like a relic from the Satanic days. “Continental Drift”, from 1989’s Steel Wheels could also be interpreted as a tribute to this maligned oddity, and the subsequent “Urban Jungle” tour featured the first ever live performance of a Satanic Majesties number: “2000 Light Years from Home”. In 1995, Jagger told Rolling Stone, “It's a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: ‘She's a Rainbow’ and ‘2000 Light Years From Home.’ The rest of them are nonsense.” At other times he unconvincingly suggested it was actually a comedy album. 

Keith Richards basically shared Jagger’s opinion that most of the album was crap, while tossing in “Citadel” among the good tracks. Jagger and Charlie Watts at least admitted it was fun to make (and it sounds like it was). Other members of the band, particularly Bill Wyman and unofficial Stone Ian Stewart, have been less equivocal about their dislike of the album, yet it has enjoyed something of a critical reassessment in recent years, Kurt Loder labeling it “unjustly underestimated” in 2002 and the All Music Guide calling it “unfairly undervalued” in its four-star review. I, for one, rate Their Satanic Majesties Request as my personal favorite Rolling Stones album, even though I’ll admit that Beggars Banquet (which places many of the themes and a good deal of the instrumentation of Satanic in a less otherworldly environment) is their best. Their Satanic Majesties Request solidified both my love of psychedelia and my love of The Rolling Stones, and while I’m a fan of most phases of the band’s career, none fascinate me like that fleeting period when they donned a bunch of goofy Merlin hats, cranked up their sitars and Mellotrons, and conjured the most exotic, most spellbinding music of their seemingly endless career.

(Instead of embedding audio clips, which slows down this site considerably, I’ve included links to the appropriate clips instead).

Their Satanic Majesties Request by The Rolling Stones
Originally released December 8, 1967 on Decca Records
Produced by The Rolling Stones

Track 1: Sing This All Together