Top Ten Of The Week

1. Holiday-Nazareth 1980 In this day and age this band would have never recorded so many albums as they did for A & M but then again Jerry and Herb had more open minds than whoever is running the store at Universal. A change in pace, Jeff Baxter produced this and Zal Cleminson from The Sensational Alex Harvey Band became the new guitar player replacing Manny Charlton. This did some airplay on KRNA back in 1980 as Nazareth tried to change their sound a bit. Didn't work well for album sales but reviews were actually pretty good.

2. Little Darlin-Natural Gas 1976 Interesting group led by Joey Mallond from Badfinger and Jerry Shirley from Humble Pie on drums but they also had Peter Wood and Mark Clarke and got Felix Pappalardi to produce this. Album sunk without a trace, in fact I found my copy for a dollar at Woolworth's. Basically the promotion at Private Stock was non existent. However this did get reissued on CD not too long ago. A cult classic.

3. I'm A Happy Man-The Jive Five Featuring Eugene Pitt 1965 Best known for their hit My True Story, this doowop band moved over to United Artists and tried to update with their type of soul music and this was their highest charting single. Eugene Pitt has one of the more distinct falsettos in music if you ever hear come across hearing him. Back in the CD era of 1992, EMI reissued all of their UA recordings into one nifty CD of 21 songs of soul and doowop. Commands big bucks on EBAY but got mine for half priced at Craig's Real Records in IC.

4. Fell In Love With A Girl-The White Stripes 2002 We spend so much time on the net that it's hard to believe it's been 8 years since this came out and hit the top ten. Came from their third album and finally the hype that SPIN and Rolling Stone gave Jack and Meg White paid off. The best of the garage rock movement although Meg White seems to be more content with the married life and Jack White is bashing away on drums for The Dead Weather.

5. World Of Pain-Cream 1967 Take away the 20 minute Toad and the 16 minute Sweet Wine and you got some decent 3 minute songs from EC, Jack Bruce (when he could sing) and Ginger Baker. Somewhere out there there's a 25 minute version of World Of Pain that the world is ready to discover (complete with drum solo).

6. Lyla-Oasis 2005 Yes Noel Gallagher can be an asshole but he can on occasion can write a nice little number and a great album. I just about gave up on Oasis after their ho hum Heathen Chemistry but with Don't Believe The Truth they came up with their best album since What's The Story Morning Glory. They rocked harder thanks to Zak Starkey playing drums too before he up and left to join The Who. But seems like The Gallagher Brothers put him to better use than Pete and Roger ever did. Oh BTW, to Anonymous who didn't bother to read the rest of the post, I do like Noel Gallagher's songs and consider Morning Glory and The Masterplan to be the classic Oasis albums with Don't Believe The Truth a close third. Name calling doesn't get you noticed here on the Crabb Top Ten that's why we have censors here. But thanks for reading anyway. BTW Lyla is a great song, glad you noticed.

7. Live It Up-Ted Nugent 1977 Being a RWNJ has made Nugent just about unlikeable but when I see the need to hear Terrible Ted, I'll play something that has Derek St Holmes singing and keeping the politics of the Nuge to a bare minimum. But I'm sure Ted has aspirations of having his own show on FOX news in the future. As Frank Zappa put it, "shut up and play your guitar".

8. Talk Talk-Talk Talk 1982 It came from the 80's and probably should stay there. This is my favorite song from Mark Hollis and company although it only reached the middle of the top 100.

9. Dear Mom-Joe Jackson 2000 Night And Day was the surprise hit of 1982 but the followup done 18 years later was more darker and not top forty friendly. It's more of a concept album than Night And Dry but latter day Joe Jackson, seems to like more strings and more opera singers than the average rocker would like. And more forgettable too.

10. Answering Machine-The Replacements 1984 If 1985 sucked to high heaven thanks to crap like Broken Wings or Take On Me or We Built This City, the year before gave us some nice independent music from the garage and Minneapolis was the place to be. Two bands of note came out of there, Husker Du and their noise to go guitar of Bob Mould and original drummer screamer Grant Hart (to which Dave Grohl owes more than he knows) and the other the drunken Replacements with Paul Westerburg writing them out. The Huskers gave us New Day Rising, and The Replacements gave us Let It Be, the which nowadays more people remember the latter than the former. My favorite track remains the finale to which Paul Westerburg is trying to talk sense into a phone answering machine which seems to be melting down towards the end of song. For fun and games seek out the Let It Be expanded edition to which Paul and company cover the Defranco Family's Heartbeat It's a Love Beat. Has to be heard to be believed.