Top Ten Of The Week-News & Views

Songs of note:

1.  Good Vibrations-The Beach Boys 1966   I'm still not sure what to think of that performance that they put together at the GrammyTM awards last week and Bob Lefsetz was full of shit of anyway.  Let's face it, he's not a big fan of Foster The People and even the odious Maroon 5 did a good Beach Boys cover.  But it's creepy to see Neo Republican Mike Love prancing around the stage, scaring away anybody under 12 as if your parents were telling you this the type of person to stay away from.  (Nay Nay, Mike Love Stay Away).  And if the Beach Boy's 50th Concert party doesn't get canceled the way Black Sabbath's was I'll be surprised.  Certainly Al and Bruce were rocking about like they would at a Beach Boys concert but Brian Wilson looked as if he didn't want no part of this and quickly got off the stage as soon the song was over.  This is not the 60s anymore people, it's basically a couple of greedy managers and a couple of washed up musicians who played minor roles in the band trying to ride the $$$ train and nostalgia for those who want to pay big bucks to relive 50 years of what they used to be.  They're not the same anymore, you're not the same anymore, I'm not the same anymore.  Lost too many brain cells along the way. http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/the-beach-boys-why

2.  Draggin The Line-Tommy James 1971  My dog Sam eats Purple Flowers, ain't got much but what we got towers...hippy dippy lines from the last number 2 song that Tommy James recorded and yes it's still a good song that gets played a lot on oldies radio.  Something about 40 year old songs that still get played regularly that's better than most that comes out today.  I've seen the critics darling band Sleigh Bells on Saturday Night Live on their second song and it was about as bad as Lana Del Rey although not that bad for me to check out unlike Del Rey who continues to get slagged from the critical elite.    Chick singer from Sleigh Bells needs a few more tattoos.  Besides what is the point of tattoos on around the neck?  I'm seeing more of that from women and it just screams at me how much you want to bet that they live in the hood, have 3 children from 3 different daddies and spend their money on cigarettes when they get their food stamps?   Tattoos are nice but they do shrink and pull when you get older or have more kids and by the time you reach my age, they look gross.  Mark Walburg sez it best, that tattoo removal hurts like hell so think before you add the ink folks.  Ink is forever.   Yep, I'm getting off subject here, REM does a fine version of this song, sung by Mike Mills and you can only find it on the Austin Powers Spy That Shagged Me Soundtrack. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFBDz5EAi6Q

3.  The Good, The Bad & The Ugly-Hugo Montenegro 1968   Where Clint Eastwood becomes the cult hero in the Man With No Name spaghetti westerns and the bizarre music of Ennio Morricone which may have started kraut rock before it was even born, Kraut music for Itlatian?  Bullshit R.S.  It's fun to speculate I guess but doesn't cost the world like a oil speculator on Wall Street playing on fear to jack the gas prices up and up more.  Five bucks a gallon? Fucking Wall Street will do their damnest to make it a reality and get Obama out of the White House in favor of some GOP prick who rather control a woman's body than to have cheap oil prices.  Newt Gingrich says make me POTUS, and we can return to 2.50 a gallon gas and take away your birth control too.  Not exactly a fair exchange I don't think.  Economy is getting better, dow over 13,000 which means the gas prices went up another 10 cents.  Even good news it goes up.  I hope in the next world we can live together in peaceful harmony and not have to rely on gas prices to decide if we are going anyplace else but work and Wally World.  Way things are going we may not have any more record stores.  Have to rely on Goodwill, such as where I found a copy of Music from Good, Bad & Ugly.  Actually they're easy to find there, you just hope they don't have a scratched up copy.  Had the 45 years ago.  Still sounds good on vinyl.  Sony Music should consider putting out a surround sound mix of this song.

4.  Party Line-Prism 1980  They were from Canada and made some lite rock albums of the late 70s and early 80s and made 5 albums for Capitol.  Didn't pay too much attention to them since they had no radio airplay back then but they had more rock credo than originally thought.  Bruce Fairbairn produced their albums, Jim Vallance sang lead vocal on their debut as Rodney Higgs (while he was working on a career as songwriter and co writer with Bryan Adams) and Bob Rock recorded some of their albums.  While they were better known in Canada, the US folk didn't pay too much attention to them.  In fact their best known single was Don't Let Him Know written by Vallance/Adams and sung by newbie Henry Small and produced by John Carter (RIP).  Basically the end of the band, the next album Beat Street was actually Small and hired hands and basically a junk album.  Vocalist Ron Tabak died in 1984 who sings on this track.  Prism today has no original members left, Al Harlow keeps the band going from time to time and they tour Canada a couple months out of the year.  I'm surprised that Renaissance didn't add Young And Restless as a track to their best of Prism that came out back in 1996, it did win a JUNO for best song.

5.  Congo-Genesis 1997  If you had your doubts when Phil Collins took over for Peter Gaberial, at least he got me to listen to their albums of 1980s.  Genesis of the 1970s when Peter was dressing up in odd costumes concept albums like Lamb Lies Down On Broadway made me think they really overrated and it's still hard for me to sit through that or Selling England By The Pound, they bored the hell out of me.  Collins took over in 1976 and stumbled through a hit with Follow You, Follow Me and Duke was a concept album that had a radio ready singles with Misunderstanding and Turn It On Again.  Their 1983 album and the no prog rock at all sounding Invisible Touch are the only two albums I could sit through and listen.  Less said about We Can't Dance the better but when Collins left the band, they continued on with Ray Wilson and made perhaps their worst album in their career with Calling All Stations.  In his defense Wilson more akin to Gaberial than Collins in vocals but Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks gave him very little to work with for actual songs.  You get 11 songs pushing 68 minutes and it's a chore to listen to it all.  For drummers they borrowed the one from Spock's Beard and some other dude and it's faceless as they come.  But then again I found the cd for 1 dollar so it really doesn't matter what I think.  Something to play once, slam the hell out of it and donate it back to Goodwill and holler NEXT.  Congo did get some FM airplay for about a week and Atlantic tacked it on to Turn It On Again, The Hits.  Calling All Stations was tacked on the 3 CD album All The Genesis you can stomach.

6.  Seduced By Money-The Thieves 1989
7.  I'm Just A Rebel-Billy Hill 1989

Another two fer to talk you about.  From a couple bands that made one album that didn't sell but you can find in the curiosity bins at your local junk shop.  In fact, this is the fun of collecting music, to see what forgotten bands that nobody knows about so I can talk about and nobody still knows who they are.  Hell, I'm sure I don't even know who their are but here goes.

The Thieves were signed to Capitol on the fledgeling Bug label that gave us the Johnny Otis Capitol years, some Marshall Crenshaw inspired Hillbilly comps and bands on the cutting edge.  The Thieves were produced by Crenshaw and recorded by James Ball, who recorded The Smithereens and that crappy Aerosmith Live album to which Joey Kramer was playing bad electric disco drums but Ball adds a nice crack to the drums of Jeff Finlin.  The leader of this band was Gwil Owen, who at his best does a nice Jason Ringlingburg (Yes I know, I misspelled Jason's name) and when the Thieves are on it, they sound like Jason & The Scorchers or better yet, The Questionnaires who also made two good but forgotten albums for EMI. But The Thieves sold less copies than either band and that damned hair spray look their label had them dressed up pegged them as hair metal although they owed more to Americana than Poison although the lead guitarist does sound like CC Deville at times.  Anyway, Seduced By Money was their one and done (the s/t track is great except for that goofy ending) album and nobody would hear the album till I spent 40 cents on it at a junkshop last week.  The drummer Jeff Finlin would pick up the guitar and make his own singer songwriting albums with about of sales and airplay equal to The Thieves.

Billy Hill, is a country minor supergroup that made a album for Reprise in 1989 and it too got some good reviews for those who heard it.  As you can tell it was a play on the word Hill Billy or hillbilly spelled backwards but this is the brainchild of John Scott Sherrill and Dennis Robbins, who played guitar for The Rockets who had a some hits for RSO in the 1980s.  Robbins plays a mean slide guitar but his vocals are not as distinct as radio would like them to be and so radio ignored this album and the two that he made for Giant in the 1990s.  Bob DiPiero would go on to a highly successful Nashville songwriting career, writing hits for Garth Brooks and Brooks And Dunn for a couple examples.  If you think about it, take away the fiddles on I Am Just A Rebel and it could come across a Americana album like The Thieves too.  But again it came down to the major label not knowing where to peddle these albums to the right radio stations.  So in the end, it comes down to this, they were both alternative bands.  And had no radio station that could play their stuff. Marty Stuart covered Too Much Month At The End Of The Money.

8.  There's No Me Without You-Glen Campbell 2011  While Glen Campbell continues to play on his final tour before Alzheimer's claims him his Ghost On The Canvas album remains one of the best albums that he's ever done.  More rock than county I think.  I read on the wires that his most famous producer Al DeLory passed away at age 82 on February 5.  You can read about it here. http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/2012/02/17/producerarranger-al-delory-dies-at-82/

9.  From The Beginning-Emerson Lake & Palmer 1972  I have to comment about the latest reissue news from ELP, who have reissued their albums more times than anybody else I know and that would include Motley Crue and Elvis Costello.  Originally on Atlantic, they move their reissued albums over to punk label Victory in the early 90s, and then moved them over to Rhino and then over to Shout Factory.  And now ELP fans, you can now rebuy their reissues as they move them over to a fifth label Razor & Tie.  And we can't even get fucking Universal to reissue The Brains album at all.  By now, everybody has have the ELP remasters and a fifth time reissue reeks of greed and idiocy,  no wonder cd sales are in the tank.  Are we supposed to get rewowed over bonus tracks?  Expended editions.  I like ELP just as much as the next guy but I never see the reason to replace my Victory copy of Trilogy or the Shout Factory version of Takus.  And I was wondering about seeing cut outs of the Shout Factory stuff but I know now the reason.  Razor & Tie may have put together the best best of ELP but geezus who cares anymore?

10.  Borderline-MC5 1968  A moment of silence for Michael Davis' passing.  There's a forty five version of this song but I have yet to see it on a best of so we'll settle for the version off Kick Out The Jams.

Let me bore you some more about this album.  I never knew much about the Motor City 5, and came across them via the Heavy Metal Superstars Of The 70s comp that Warner Special Products put out.  Only time I came across that album was when I found it for a 1.97 at Zaire's in Springfield around 74.   This was pretty heavy shit that I heard the rest of the album and my dad was in the room when I was playing the bizarre 2nd side and he called it the biggest pile of shit he's ever heard of.  Ya think at age 35 he would have been more open minded but although he did like the J.Geils Live album of Full House, Kick Out The Jams he hated.  No accounting for taste I don't suppose but what stood out was how off tune the guitars were and all that feedback to boot.   Good thing I didn't have any Sun Ra in the house.  Nevertheless, Kick Out The Jams was a very punk radical album, maybe so the first punk album I came across, more punk than the Stooges but real rock and roll as well.  Pure rebellion.   In the 80s I outgrew the album and my punk tendencies and traded that, most of my Ramones and Devo albums to a used record store to which would go out of business soon afterwards and regret my decision.  Hell,  I had the Elektra Butterfly label copy and the Ramones ABC/Sire label version.  Eventually, Elektra would reissue The MC5 a few years later and I got the album back.  However I scored a Japan CD version of Kick Out The Jams, when I traded away a picture CD copy of Neil Young's Freedom to get the Japanese version and still have it to this day.  Nevertheless, Elektra in the US reissued Kick Out The Jams on a cheaper reissue version.

And that's the latest top ten for this week.  Next week I promise not to be so long winded.