Keep On Rockin' In An Eighties World, Neil!

So, I hadn't really planned to follow up my alternate Trans post with another Neil Young post so soon afterwards, but as these things go. A comment by C in Cali about a fab live version of "Sample And Hold", my own comment discussing "Landing On Water", in short: the little discussions about (mostly) Eighties Neil and his various misadventures led me to check a live bootleg from the mid-80s that I remembered as really good. It's the famous and a thousand times bootlegged 1986 show from the Cow Palace in Daly City that has absolutely outstanding sound quality. One could argue better sound quality than certain records of Uncle Neil with Crazy Horse. This is, however, no coincidence. Two shows just three and two nights before were recorded for a new album, with some tracks heavily tinkered with, that would turn out to be Life in July 1987. So, two conditions were fulfilled: High end recording equipment was used to tape this show for radio braodcast, and the band was well rehearsed and in fine form. 

Beware though that this is just a small sampler, a companion compilation to that Trans album that thus leaves tons of old Neil warhorses on the side - good as they might be - to focus on his Eighties work. It has three Trans numbers: the "Mr. Soul" electro-remake (without vocoder, but otherwise still very much in the Trans vein), plus really excellent takes on "Computer Age" and "Sample And Hold" (which might be the one you have, C!). It then has most of Neil's best stuff from the rock-oriented Geffen albums of the 80s (no country stuff which I might reserve for another comp in the future): "Violent Side", "Mideast Vacation", "Around The World" - "Hippie Dream" is missing, but most of the good stuff is here. I even had space to smuggle in "Too Lonely" which might be better than that on Life.

The same is even more so true of Reactor number "Opera Star". If you want a version of "Opera Star" in your collection, make it this one. On record, the number is completely ridiculous, especially the duel of ho-ho-ho's between Neil and Crazy Horse, sounding like a drunk Christmas munchkin sing-off, or everyone taking the piss and no one giving a fuck. This version, with barely a ho-ho-ho heard, pounds that original studio version into fine dust, then stomps on its remains just for fun. This is, generally speaking, true for all the rock songs on this. They rock much freakin' harder than their studio counterparts. I do miss the swirling synths Neil added to "Around The World", but this version is a barnburner nonetheless. 

If ever the question is asked what Crazy Horse brought to Neil's music, you might as well play that person some of this - they're just crushing it here. A good example: their great take on "Powderfinger", which I smuggled n as the only-non-80s number in here...So, as said, this is just a teaser to remind you of, and collect in the same place, some of the strongest work of what was admittedly a complicated period for Uncle Neil. But there are songs from that time period that have stood the test of time, especially in these extra heavy versions from Neil and Crazy Horse.  

Giddy up y'all. That there Bluegrass Chartbuster show is in town again!

Time for round three of these, with a-many more coming your way. Originally I planned to have, like, three volumes of this, which means that the series would be coming to their end here. But, uh, that excalated quickly, as the saying goes. So now we're in double digits for the Bluegrass Chartbusters and have no end in sight, so I hope some of y'all are clamoring for more cool bluegrass versions of rock and pop (and punk, and country rock, and so on and so forth) songs from about the last half-century or so. Of course, knowing what I know I would have used the best tracks from my beloved Cornbread Red (pictured below) more sparingly, instead of just piling these onto the first volume especially. Oh well, I just have to go with slimmer pickings and more obscure (to me) songs from these guys once we crawl towards those double digit volumes. Incidentally they have only a single song on this volume, and it's a holdover from the Green Day comp I did a couple of months ago.

That is so because Volume Three became the most reworked of all the episodes here, as I started to really branch out of the safety of the Pickin' On series on later volumes, and then reworked the earlier volumes for more balance: Instead of only having the Pickin On housebands like Cornbread Red, Iron Horse, The Sidekicks and - increasingly - Brad Davis with band on the first handful of volumes and half a dozen other cool acts in later ones I switched and changed and juggled and replaced - and now Volume Three has somehow become the most diverse of all editions in this series - boasting no less that 15 different bands and artists for its twenty tracks! Besides repeat offenders quality contributors like the aforementioned bands we got a number of cool bands that show up here for the first time.

Two bands I recently discovered are the now sadly defunct The Wooks (who are only not called The Wookies for copyright reasons), who were mainly doing original songs, and really good ones, but also recorded the occasional cover, with their fab take on Bruce's "Atlantic City", that is slightly reminiscent of The Band's awesome cajun-flavored almost-bluegrass version. Another great recent discovery are The Grass Cats, also szdly defunct, who had a great twenty-year run, mainly as a local attraction in their home state of North Carolina. They left behind a couple of good albums and some great covers, the first one of which, a really sweet take on REO Speedwagon's "Take It On The Run" graces this volume. Happily the last of my recent discoveries, Town Mountain are still active, they clock in here with their take on alt country classic "Windfall". 

But we'll see more of these bands in the future, which isn't the same for the one-and-done that is Thunder & Rain's, uh, sweet take on "Sweet Child O' Mine". That band mainly does original songs, though they drew a lot of eyeballs on Youtube with this cover a couple of years ago. This is the original live take, not the studio version they put on an album later - this one sounds more natural and spontaneuous. 

By the way, I kind of like how the above cover recalls the mostly generic covers that the Pickin' On Series used for a decade or so before Iron Horse's Metallica album changed how they made, presented and mareketed albums. This looks like something you could take out od a rotating CD rack display in any truck stop in Rednecksville, Anywhere, U.S.A.! And that's on purpose! But it's a hundred times more awesome of course!

Artists covered include CCR, Prince, Pearl Jam, A-Ha, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Eagles/J.D. Souther, The Band, Black Sabbath, Oasis, The Rolling Stones and The Who. I also have to mention opener "Don't Stop Believin'", one of the best numbers of the entire series with some extraordinary mandolin and fiddle work by Pine Mountain Railroad that feel totally at home in the song and turn in from a somewhat hackneyed AOR song into a marvelous bluegrass number.

Anyway, Bluegrass Chartbusters Vol. 3 keeps up the quality of the first two albums, and the tons of new artists on here give the album a real freshness, due to the slightly different varying approaches of covering famous songs in a bluegrass style. Good stuff all around, one again. Get the bluegrass jukebox goin' once more...

Transforming Trans: Neil Young's electronic adventures revisited...

Maybe thinking about that whole misshapen Chris Gaines debacle made me think of other albums where the concept and the things surrounding its creation are more interesting than the music itself. Inevitably, I ended up with one of the most infamous albums that was a mix of weird ambitions, selfindulgence and a genuine sense of discovery: Uncle Neil and Trans. Now, to be fair, it's not that the music isn't interesting (it is) or downright bad (it isn't) , but that it didn't sound like anything Young did before (and would after). Infamously, it was of course also the album that had Young's new record label Geffen shaking their head in disbelief, the first step leading to the label suing Young for making 'uncommercial and uncharacteristic music' later on, when he added the ridiculous rockabilly exercise Everybody's Rockin' six months later as a fuck you to Geffen, when they had rejected country album Old Ways. Now, Everybody's Rockin' really is Young's worst album, a joke that finally was on the listener, in a 'the food was terrible, and such small portions, too' way. Customers paid full price for 25 minutes of awful ersatz rockabilly. In order to annoy Geffen further, Uncle Neil agreed to a promotional video for the better-than-the-rest original "Wonderin'" (a repurposed country number from around 1970), but mugged for the video to ridicule the whole exercise and also looked like a deranged serial killer:

But I digress. Trans, baby! Most of you will probably know the backstory to this album (and there's always Wikipedia), so I'll keep it brief for the few that don't: Young was heavily occupied in the early 8às with caring for his handicapped son Ben, who - like Young's first son, Zeke - was born with cerebral palsy, and was thus unable to communicate verbally. Long, repetitive routines to try to communicate with Ben were part of Neil's daily life, and this repetitiveness crept into Neil's music: in his awful last album for Reprise, Reactor, and obviously Trans. But the latter was a rather pointed way to analyze and put into metaphor Young's family situation. As he said, Trans was a fantasy about robot nurses in a hospital getting a young boy to push a button to communicate, parallelling Young's attempt to rewire one of his electric train systems in his house to communicate with the non-verbal Ben, who could imitate his father's movements via a self-constructed headset. 

While his family situation gave the album its thematic background, the sound was equally appropriate. The robotic, relentless beats from the sequencer mimicked the long, arduous therapy sessions, and Young's new love for synclavier and vocoder led him even further down the rabbit hole of how people are able to communicate. The vocoder makes the lyrics often difficult to grasp, and sometimes impossible to make out (as on parts of "Transformer Man"), but maybe therein lay a message as well: Human connection can transcend words, and maybe electric connection can as well. The idea of communicating with his son via robots and their sounds are at the core of Trans and at the core of "Transformer Man" - but at its heart lies a very human realizaton: The words don't matter, if the sound of them comes out right. And you can hear Young's love and encouragement for Ben in "Transformer Man", despite the lyrics being grabled, maybe especially because their garbled, when he moves into his falsetto and the vocoder turns his words almost indistinguishable. As Young himself said: "On that record, you know I'm saying something, but you can't understand what it is. Well, that was the feeling I was getting from my son."

Old school Young fans were of course recoiling in horror, when the vocoder first comes in roughly a third into "Computer Age". But here's the thing: I'm not like most Young fans. I felt like the inclusion of three tracks that have nothing to do with the concept, thrown in more or less to fill up the album, was a huge misstep that undermined the fascinating and - in its own weird way - quite wonderful record. One thing that was almost always missing, even from some of Neil's most popular albums, was cohesion. Uncle Neil simply never had much use for it. Need to fill an album up to album running time? Just throw in a couple of refurnished (or not) outtakes, or a live track or two, or whatever else was lying around. Even Harvest, the Young classic that even people who don't know much about Young have at home, was hardly a paragon of cohesion: In between the two heavily orchestrated numbers, the live track, and the one rock workout coming at the end of a predominantly acoustic album, cohesion wasn't the name of the game - one reason why I reworked it as Harvest Time, still the most popular album in One Buck Records history. 

So while most Neil Young fans would probably clamor for less vocoders and sequencers, not more of them, but our One Buck Record of the day is going the opposite way, bullheaded like Uncle Neil himself.  This version of Trans is not for folks who didn't like its sound in the first place, instead it doubles down on it and presents an album that stays with Young's concept from beginning to end, thus it's nicknamed the fully automated version. The three conventional tracks sung in Young's normal voice stick out like a sore thumb on the original Trans, especially "Litte Thing Called Love" and "Hold On To Your Love", both taken from another planned album completely (for years thought to be called Islands In The Sun, though on Archives III Young names it as Johnny's Island). And the concluding epic "Like An Inca" seems to be an entirely different thing together, unfortuately a deathly dull ramble stuck to a relentless synth beat, and thus never able to break out into hidden Young classic territory. So those three had to go (or almost). There are no Trans outtakes of any kind on Volume Three of his Archives, so it stands to reason that the six electro-and-vocoder tracks (counting the mix'n'match remake of "Mr. Soul") are all that exists of electronic Trans music. Which of course made building an entire electronic Trans retroactively somewhat challenging.

Challenging isn't impossible, though. I first thought of having some sort of little overture for the album that inroduced its sound and vision. So I looped the first bars of the 12" version of "Sample And Hold" and overlaid Young repeating the album title in a robotic vocoder voice, thus creating "Trans", the track, a short intro before the familiar beat of "Computer Age" takes over. Then I had to decide which version of "Sample And Hold" to use, the five-minute original album version or the eight-minute 12" cut. And guess what, I kept both. If there can be two "My My, Hey Hey"'s and two "Rockin' In The Free World"'s, then why the hell not two "Sample And Hold"'s? Especially since the feel and sound of both versions are quite different. Interestingly, the most guitar-heavy number on the entire album, the short version of "Sample And Hold" is co-credited to The Trans Band and not Crazy Horse, who are co-credited on the thumping "We R In Control" (whose little 'woo-woo-woo sound' I love) and "Computer Cowboy", the most humorous track on the album, and also one of my favorites. The eight-minute 12" version of "Sample And Hold"is significantly different, almost entirely electronic, with the guitars pushed further back in the mix, with additional lyrics and vocoder interplay. I figured both versions were different enough from each other to merit inclusion. Needless to say, it was also a cheap way to fill out the album to reach an acceptable album running time. I'm borrowing Uncle Nel's tricks!

I still thought that that was a little thin as far as the track list goes, so I decided to rescue one of the thrown off tracks - and tried to, well, transform it. I ran "Hold On To Your Love" through the vocoder to bring it closer in sound to its Trans colleagues. Granted, it's didn't come out a hundred percent how I wanted - for that I probably would have had to separate the vocals from the rest, then put the vodocer on it, but that starts to be outside of my capabilities, especially since I never got to working well with the AV5 audio editing program and finally abandoned it. This version of the track is thus an experiment that maybe isn't perfect, but it more or less does what I wanted it to. It brings the fully automated version of Trans to a 36 minute run time and now carries nine tracks, which makes it an authentic-enough looking simile of what the album could have also looked like in late 1982 or early 1983. 

So, this is obviously a way tougher sell than Harvest Time, but hell, a challenge's a challenge, right? So, be a pal (or a girl pal), and try out the fully electronic Trans experience. It might not transform your opinion of this most misunderstood album of Young's career, but you never know...

You Are Hereby Cordially Invited To Attend The Butterfly Ball

Some of the more obscure albums to feature here on One Buck Records I stumble onto by accident - following an artist or type of music by a thread. Some I find lthe old-fashioned way ike you would find here - on blogs, in articles, in user comments. And some albums I stumble onto, well, just like that. Take The Butterfly Ball by Roger Glower & Friends. Had never heard of the thing, had never heard a thing from it. Then, one day riding in the car, "Love Is All" came on the radio - and I'm pretty sure it's only a radio song over here in France - and my wife said something like "Mais c'est le chanson de la grenouille!". The frog song? What the hell? (Cheap joke: If it's running on French radio, doesn't it automatically turn into a frog song?) It turns out when something goes wrong on live television on French national TV, they - and we're talking about the late Seventies and early Eighties here - they didn't put up a test screen or some sort of sign apologizing for the incident, no the French had something much better, they had la grenouille who sang "Love Is All". They had this: 

So, my wife knew the singing frog, but not necessarily any other critters that make up the cast of The Butterfly Ball, or indeed that very event or musical album. And so I got her The Butterfly's Ball for an upcoming birtday. This album is - very Seventies. It could probably have come out only at that time, and definitely only in Great Britain. There is this very specifically British type of whimsy that drives the project that seems impossible to imitate. I mean the idea itself sounds sufficiently daft: Making an album out of a children's book of drawings. Alan Aldridge's The Butterfly Ball And The Grasshopper's Feast had some accompanying verse by poet William Plomer (who died before publication), but Glover - free from obligations in Deep Purple and just at the start of his career as a producer - was tasked to bring the tale into a musical form. 

Glover wrote the whole album - some co-written with Eddie Hardin, as well as with Ronnie James Dio and Mickey Lee Soule - , played a varoiety of instruments on the recording, including guitar, piano, bass, and percussion. And while he contributed some backing vocals, for lead vocal duty he went through his roloscope and found a ton of help. The three aforementioned collaborators take leads, as well as new Deep Purple members David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, and a couple of others. On the female side of things, we get his wife Judi Kuhl, Helen Chapelle and Liza Strike. And of course we're going out, fittingly, with a children's choir.

While the album is a work that is supposed to work as a whole, but the obvious highlight here is the aforementioned "Love Is All", obviously influenced by the Beatles "All You Need Is Love", a happy singalong that was the first song finished for the project. Though credited to Glover & Friends on the single, lead vocals are by Ronnie James Dio. The track made number one in the Netherlands and Belgium and, as explained above, became very popular in France during fill-ins, the became a full-fledged smash on rerelease in 1991 after it was featured in an ad. Other highlights include the folk-ish "Sitting In A Dream", delicately sung by Dio, and the rollicking "Sir Maximus Mouse", sung by Eddie Hardin. This is the complete version of the album, including "Little Chalk Blue" with lead vocals by Urias Heep's John Lawton, which was issued ten months after the album to promote the concert of The Butterfly Ball that finally took place in December 1975. 

So, this is a true oddball little thing, with more than a touch of British music hall shining through here and there in this 'rock opera', which is not that surprising considering such song titles as "Saffron Dormouse And Lizzy Bee", "Old Blind Mole", "Dreams Of Sir Bedivere" and "Watch Out For The Bat". But then again, you're not coming here for mainstream stuff, do ya? So, get in touch with your inner child, join the animals of the forest in their preparation for the titular event and let yourself get carried away to the land of the silly and the whimsical, the land of The Butterfly Ball. 

The Year Of The Desperado

The Year Of The Desperado, at least for the purposes of the One Buck Record of the day, started in early March 1973 and ended about thirteen months later. On March 10 1973 the Eagles took the stage of the Sporthal de Vliegermolen, a local gym in Voorburg in the Netherlands for a festival called Popgala 73. At that time the release of Desperado was two weeks away, which means that the Eagles premiered a whooping five numbers from the album that evening, plus J.D. Souther's "How Long" which would only find a place on an Eagles record 34 years later. Ten days later they gave a concert for the BBC that split the difference bewteen numbers from their succesful debut album and the upcoming Desperado. And then, a little less than a year later, on April 14 1974 the Eagles were invited to Don Kirshner's Rockconcert series, bringing with them friends like Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt. By that time, On The Border had come out, but a nuber of Desperado tracks remained in the line-up, including a show-stopping and show-concluding extended run through "Doolin-Dalton - Desperado (Reprise)".  

So here's the breakdown: the first eight tracks are from Popgala '73, the following four from the BBC cncert and then the last four from the Kirshner show. Most of these 15 tracks present Desperado songs, plus songs that fit the vibe or sound. The Popgala tracks are interesting, because while the soundboard mix is pretty clear, it also is an unusual mix. Don Henley's instruments are much higher in the mix than usual, giving these tracks a sound that goes off the beaten Eagles path. And for a band that was notorious for playing everything exactly as in the studio, that's is something. You can hear Henley's drumming or percussion work. This might not be surprising for the opening "Take It Easy" (after the traditional a capella rendering of the first verse of "Fair And Tender Ladies") which is acoustic and has Henley do percussion on the guitar on his lap. But it gives even an old warhorse like "Peaceful Easy Feeling" a slightly different feeling, Henley's pushed to the front drumming and the rather loose steel guitar from Leadon giving it a loping feel that the pretty, shiny studio version and most of its live apperance clones don't have. And you can hear every movement of Henley's hi-hat at the beginning of "Certain Kind Of Fool". 

Speaking of that song, one of my favorites of the album, it's the only one on here that is present in two versions, because I thought the Popgala and BBC ones were sufficiently different and both worth keeping, while I picked the BBC versions of "(Whatever Happened To) Saturday Night" and "Out Of Control" because the former has a longer mandolin solo and the latter has cleaner sound. "Early Bird" from that BBC concert is an interesting case to make for the early Eagles being a band worth seeing and hearing in concert. From about mid-1974 onwards, their concerts became calcified and repetitive, no doubt responsible for the Rolling Stone infamously accusing them of "loitering on stage". But in the two years beforehand they occasionally deviated from the well-studied studio versions, such as on "Early Bird" whose running time gets more than doubled via a long jam section. 

I also kept the banter on the Popgala tracks, because it's interesting to see how the Eagles (d)evolved. Some of the interaction might be akward, especially when Glenn Frey takes the mic, but at least they try to communicate with the audience, when in later years they would pretty much leave it at "We're the Eagles from Los Angeles. It's also interesting to note who's doing the banter here. It's normal that you don't hear the terminally shy Randy Meisner, but there also is not a single peep from Henley, with Leadon and Frey - the band's two most outgoing characters, taking the mic (and sometimes sniping at each other, setting up a volatile relationship that would eventually become openly hostile). 

The Year Of The Desperado doesn't only make a case for the quality of the Desperado material but also for the quality of the early Eagles as a fine concert attraction, and it's a very fine way to spend an hour and change. So, here's the Eagles from Los Angeles with tales of outlaws and low lives or maybe low life rockstars. Let The Year Of The Desperado begin...

When The Eagles Turned Desperado...And Unveiled Their Masterpiece

"They've made a fuckin' cowboy album!" This was the less-than-enthusiastic reaction of Atlantic label boss Jerry Greenberg, whose lbel was distributing Assylum records at the time, upon hearing what the new golden boys of the Asylum label had been up to for about a month in London. He certainly didn't expect an entire album based on old West outlaws and their similarities to current rock stars. Asylum head honcho David Geffen was barely more impressed. Of course, one issue was coolness. Looking like hippies on their first album, he could sell this music to hippies and housewives alike, but now these guys were playing dress up on the cover material and singing about bank robbers in the 1880s? History almost proved Greenberg, who maintained that coboy records wouldn't sell, and Geffen right, at least at first, because Desperado didn't repeat the success of the Eagles' debut album. Both singles stiffed (more on that later) and the album took a year and a half to go gold. Was it a mistake to make that "fuckin' cowboy album"?  

I had a real 'two roads diverged in a yellow wood' moment when I picked up my first Eagles album. My record store (well, one of my record stores) had a 'cheaper and last items' section which I browsed through, as usual. This was at the beginning of my life as a student and thus at the beginning of me slowly building a classic rock collection. So I stumbled on two Eagles discs, probably thrown out to make way for the remasters that were coming up. One was The Long Run. The other one was, obviously, Desperado. I decided I could take one, but not both. On one hand we had the simple black album cover, on the other the old west outlaws. 

I'd like to think that my love for Westerns, instilled to me by my father's love for Westerns made me choose Desperado and its cowboy chic, but it's just as likely that I checked the back covers and the titles on The Long Run made me wonder. "The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks"? "Teenage Jail"? "Those Shoes"? Yeah, no, I take the cowboys there, thank you very much. Needless to say, I made the good choice. I doubt I would have become an Eagles fan based on The Long Road, as a matter of fact. It's still the worst of all Eagles albums and probably the worst of all the big, heavily awaited releases ever. Yuck. Desperado, though? Hear me out on this, folks, because it just might be the Eagles' masterpiece. 

There's a persistent myth about the Eagles, often brought up in connection with Desperado and its artwork, that the Eagles weren't really country, that they were a bunch of fakers who would do this ridiculous dress-up but were, as Michael Murphy would say, "city slicker lickers, they gotta a lot of licks slicker than you and me". But that is, as a lot of things concerning the band, a mix of self-mythologizing gone wrong and a lot of half-assed assumptions by observers. "We're the Eagles from Los Angeles" might have been their slogan, but the Eagles came from everywhere in the U.S. 

Randall Herman Meisner was born the son of a sharecropper in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. You can't get any more country than that. Donald Hugh Henley grew up in a small town in northeast Texas. Sounds pretty country to me. Bernard Michael Leadon III was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, though he was the frst to adop California as his home state. The only real faker of the crew was, of course, Glenn Frey, who was born and grew up in Detroit and idolized local hero Bob Seger. Frey, notably, went into sensitive folk-rock, then country-rock, because he saw a career opportunity there. But yeah, I'd say two and a half cowboys out of four is pretty damn enough. 

Whether you agreed with the album's premise of likening 1970s rock stars to 1880 outlaws, or thought it was silly, you can not accuse the Eagles of not committing to it. I never realized until some Glenn Frey banter in a live show, how smartly they go about it. Take "A Certain Kind Of Fool" for example. Listening to it like that, with the Wild West artwork and everything, you would of course figure it's about a young guy buying a gun, becoming a gunfighter and "a wanted man" on the poster on a store front - but it never openly says that the object, "so shiny and new in his hand", was a gun - it might just as well be a guitar, and the poster is a concert poster.

This kind of double meaning applies to a whole number of songs: When Bernie Leadon sings in "Twenty-One" that "they say a man should have a stock and trade / but me I find another way", is he talking abut turning outlaw or turning rock'n'roll singer? The guys coming into town and causing havoc while getting a little "Out Of Control" could be cowhands raising hell after their payday, or a rock'n'roll band partying, right?! The old, short (and now replaced) Allmusic review complained that "none of the songs fit the storyline", but there was no storyline per se to follow - and they did almost entirely follow the thematic concept of the record.  

Desperado was also the big coming out party for Don Henley and a harbinger for things to come, with all that implies. On the debut he was hardly noticable, as a singer or songwriter. He had half a song credit to his name, even if - another harbnger to come - it was on hit sngle "Witchy Woman" that he also sung. But for his second slated lead vocal they had to wheel out a Jackson Browne tune, as if Henley couldn't write a second quality tune. Well, that would change, quickly. Henley is credited on eight of the eleven songs on Desperado, and sings lead on four of them - most of all Eagles in both cases. And while the Henley-Frey combo might not be as renowned as Lennon-McCartney or Richards-Jagger, that writing team was born here, and there is no denying its efficacity. Unsurprisingy, the two big songs that everyone knows off this album were both Henley-Frey compositions. Tellingly, these weren't the two singles off the album, because "Desperado" was never issued as such. 

More proof that, despite "Witchy Woman", the Eagles were at this time seen as a band with a clear lead singer in Glenn Frey, so Asylum would ty to mirror the band's debut album and issue a Frey-sung uptempo tune à la "Take It Easy" ("Outlaw Man") and a Frey-sung ballad à la "Peaceful, Easy Feeling" ("Tequila Sunrise"). Also: check out the album cover, on which the two most prominent guys are Leadon and Meisner, with Frey half-blocked out by Meisner and Henley having half of his face hidden by the shadow of his cowboy hat. This would obviously be the last time that Henley would be obscured on something Eagles-related. Henley seemingly had the greatest affinity for the cowboy material, yet it's still quite a leap to go from a single co-credit on the debut to co-writing two-thirds of an album. Naturally, Henley profited from this, as his songwriting credits, number of lead vocals and influence on the group's fortune grew massively, almost as a direct result from Desperado. 

On the nine original tracks (not couting the two "Doolin-Dalton" reprise songs), I don't see a single duffer. The weakest is probably "Out Of Control", and even that one hints at the harder rock direction the band would soon afterwards veer into. Despite Glyn Johns' excellent work on Desperado the band - well, mainly Glenn Frey and Don Henley - were growing tired of Johns and his rules (no drugs in the studio! how dare he?) and production (deemed too soft by the two), but the switch to Bill Szymchyk halfway through follow-up On The Border didn't yield an album as satisfying as Desperado. As a matter of fact, none of them did. Sure, they got bigger and ridiculously successful, but for me they never bettered Desperado, even on Hotel California which comes closest. 

Desperado deserves a listen from those who never gave a fuck about the Eagles, or a second listen from those who have written off the Eagles due to the played-to-death-radio-hits. It will also be the first of a series of albums about America in the 19th Century that I plan to post. And be back tomorrow for a Desperado-themed bonus...

From The Spiderweb-Covered Attic: Still The Ass-Kickingest Horror Music Compilation You'll Ever Hear...

Halloween, baby, time to bring out the scary again. This time with real emphasis on the word again. Long-time followers of the blog will know Best Of Horror Vol. 1 already. But hell, a little repost from time to time hasn't hurt anybody and it has been two years since I originally posted this, when this blog was still in its infancy and fighting to slowly crawl into triple digits , so a number of you might not have this, but should get it. 

I lacked time - and, let's be honest here - motivation this year to compile another compilation of music from horror films. And, being honest, and a little full of myself, again, why would I? I recently listened to Best Of Horror Vol. 1 again, and that compilation still holds up splendidly. Those suites that I did for the Friday The 13th series, and John Carpenter's The Fog and Prince of Darkness? Still an excellent way to get the strongest moments from those scores all in one place. 

classic film, classic poster

But since we're not all in on the lazy recycling business, here's the kicker for collectors: A special, exclusive, only on this edition, unavailable elsewhere BONUS TRACK (What, too much?!). Yup, even here on One Buck Records, we go for collector's bait. Actually, this morning in the school where I work, during class breaks, we were, ahem, celebrating Halloween. Lights out, scary sound effects and music on the comm system, that kind of thing. And, completely unbeknownst to my two bosses, on one of the scary music Cds that they no doubt picked up completely at random there was...the main theme from Suspiria! Good choice, compilers of unknown Halloween-themed CD. So, that gave me an idea. 

I have never liked Goblin's soundtrack to Suspiria much. I know it is held in high esteem by both horrorfilm score and prog rock fans, but I find the whole thing a taxing experience, with the prog side of Goblin meaning that they often stretch out the music unnecessarily, which goes into the straight up annoying when they do yelling witch voices and such. The tracks on the album are reminiscent of the ones in the film, but not quite the same. So for the extra special bonus track, I mixed two tracks ("Suspiria" and "Witch") together to approximate the feel of the score that's playing in the opening minutes, during Suzie's taxi ride through the forests to the dancing academy. It has to be said, that Suspiria's opening is its pièce de résistance, and one of the most stonishing sequences ever put to film. It's an assault on the senses - sound, music, color - that Argento never did again in such concentrated form. That first reel of Suspiria is so outstanding, that unfortunately the rest of the film can never really match it, and the finale is sadly kind of a dud. But that opening, man, even as a short film, that thing is killer, literally and figuratively...

The inclusion of "Suspiria Witch" means that I'm breaking a rare principle, as I also break the 80 minute plane with that track included. If, for some crazy reason, you would want to burn this to disc, you'd have to kick something off or overburn. But then again, the tiniest percentage of you is even thinking 'CD', so I'm probably worrying for nothing. 

Anyway, here's the 2025 special bonus track edition of Best Of Horror Vol. 1. Have a happy All Hallow's Eve everybody...