Some say their music will end in fire, some say in ice...

Quickly, dear reader, when was the last time you thought of Icehouse? That is, if you ever thought at all of Iva Davies and whoever he recruited around him as Icehouse. They were huge in their home country, but basically a one-hit wonder everywhere else. That hit, though, was huge. "Hey Little Girl" made the Top 20 in most European countries in 1982, and it is still playing regularly on oldies stations these days. Weirdly enough, or maybe not, as the U.S. were slower to embrace synth-pop, "Girl" didn't even chart in the U.S. (though it made both the rock and dance charts), but five years later Icehouse became a two-hit wonder there with "Electric Blue" and "Crazy" both making the top twenty. Not surprisingly, as by that time they had embraced a more openly mainstream pop-rock sound.

Icehouse came, like pretty much any Australian band ever, out of the pub rock circuit, because when you were an upstart band down under that's what you did. But, like INXS who started out at pretty much the same time, Icehouse fell under the spell of the new exciting sounds of New Wave and synth pop acts, and much like Michael Hutchence & Co. they embraced that music for the first couple of years of their existence, alternating icy synth songs and nervy New Wave-style rock tracks. Funnily, of course, their debut album isn't Flowers by Icehouse, but rather Icehouse by Flowers, which was the band's name for the first three and a half years of their existence. But when they got European distribution deals and didn't want to get confused witt Scottish band The Flowers, they essentially switched things around, becoming Icehouse instead. Which, ironically means that retrospectively they got their own theme song with the title song of the Icehouse album.  

Icehouse was, and is, and always has been, Iva Davies' baby. He was the bandleader, and sometimes the entire band. Icehouse's breakthrough, 1982's Primitive Man was essentially a Davies solo record (with some help on percussion from co-producer Keith Forsey), later band configurations would sometimes include early band members   like Michael Holste, but essentially Davies recruited whoever he needed at any given time. (There are at least 24 current or former Icehouse members). The music was as fluid and prone to changes as the band line-ups. Icehouse is, perhaps fittingly, the iciest and most European-sounding of their releases, almost exclusively centred around synthesizers. Primitive Man is still pretty firmly in the synth pop mold, but you can hear the rock guitars starting to knock on the door. Sidewalk two years later still had keyboards, but as a background feature for what was now a robust pop-rock sound, as was follow-up Measure To Measure a year later. Man Of Colours, again released only a year later, shows them at their most AOR, mainstream-ready. The band's last two albums, Code Blue and Big Wheel, have the band plateauing, but on a high level, still churning out top notch pop singles like "Big Wheel". 

Ir's interesting how closely Icehouse's evolution mirrors that of INXS, with both making major strides towards the mainstream in 1984, INXS with The Swing (though really, they had already started a year earlier with Shaboo Shooba) and Icehouse with Sidewalk. While INXS placed their bets on slightly r'n'b-influenced dance grooves and the increasingly Jagger-esque vocals of Hutchence, Davies' version of mainstream pop-rock had the slightest hints of heartland rock tucked under its shiny sheens of keyboard and guitars. Both bands realized that the novelty and reach of synth pop was starting to wear off, and adapted appropriately. INXS of course rode their formula to worldwide success, and while Icehouse's success outside of its homeland and New Zealand was more modest, they made a nice career for themselves. 

The Best Of Both Worlds gives you pretty much all the Icehouse you'll ever need. I thought a chronological order wasn't the way to go, instead I tried to go for an anti-chronological, flow-based assembly, that is still following an ordering principle. These 37 tracks are spread out over two discs thematically. Disc One (House Of Ice) has the band's more experimental and electronic work, focusing mainly on material from their first two albums and later songs that fit the mold, while disc two (House Of Fire) has the more accessible mainstream pop rock music from Sidewalk onwards. Most, but not all of their (commercially) biggest songs are here, but also a number of album tracks and single b-sides. I know I harp on a lot on this blog about sequencing and flow and yadda yadda, so I'll keep it short. The slice of moodiness called "Coda" was originally the closing track of disc one, but b-side instrumental "Promised Land" already fulfilled the function of a moody, instrumental outro, so "Coda" got placed at the tail end of disc two, fittingly being the short, sweet coda to the entire Icehouse experience of The Best Of Both Worlds. But in search of bookends, I now looked for a moody opening, a sort of overture to go with this coda, and found it in the (slightly shortened) Midnight Mix of "Crazy", which is almost all atmosphere. 

There, that's it. Sequencing discussion over. That was short and painless compared to some other write-ups, wasn't it? So, now it really is off to the music, which - if you are not a somewhat commited follower of early Aussie 80s synth pop or early 90s Australian mainstream rock, a bit of a niche genre in both cases I would think - you are in for some surprises, and a collection of interesting synth and New Wave ditties on one hand, and really well-made pop and rock confections on the other. The Best Of Both Worlds, indeed. 

Hotdayum! Them's Chartbusters back, fellas, so let's start the hootenanny...

Round two for our dip into bluegrass takes on popular songs from...oh...about the last 60 years or so. Volume one was exclusicely sourced from the Pickin' On... series, which will stay the main source of that series, but I decided to open up the series for any well-done bluegrass cover of a popular song. This mainly happened because, Honeywagon, one of my favorite bands on the CMH/Pickin On... roster , well presented on volume one, left relatively quickly. Then again, so did Cornbread Red, who at least left a ton of music behind. So, Honeywagon released at least two albums covering a single artist after leaving the Pickin' On... series, covering Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga. One is more likely to be featured here than the other, I let you guess which one it is.  

Besides stalwarts Honeywagon, Cornbread Red and Iron Horse we also have the return of The Sidekicks, though that is, as I speculated last time around, not a real band, but whatever studio pros mark Thornton is lining up in his Sidekcik Sound Studios in Nashville. Consequently, The Sidekicks have a ton of different vocalists and not really an identifiable style, unlike the three former bands. 

The Sidekicks might be anonymous, but their studio logo is pretty cool

Newcomers to Vol. 2 of Bluegrass Chartbusters are The Petersens, a family band from Branson, Missouri, the "live music capital of the world". The mom as the steadying presnce on upright bass, her three daughters and son, plus a family who mainly plays the dobro. They play gospel standards as well as - more interesting for these comps - pop and rock classics. Also showing up for the first time are Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standards, who produced an album of Lynyrd Skynyrd covers for CMH and Tim May, already featured on these pages with his Neil Young tribute.  

The list of artists covered include, among others,  Steppenwolf, The Mamas & The Papas, Journey, The Doors, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Buffalo Springfield, and Aerosmith for the classic rock era; Whitney Houston, Men At Work, Survivor, and Bon Jovi for the 80s; Pearl Jam, Barenaked Ladies and Green Day for the 90s, and Lifehouse, Aloe Blacc and Colbie Caillat for music from the 2000s. 

This volume follows in the footsteps of the first one, in that I stuck with serious readings of these songs. For now I have excluded acts like The Cleverlys or Boss Hoss (I'm kind of on the fence as far as Hayseed Dixie are concerned), who are really doing a piss-take on the genre, and are really leaning too much into the country yokel humor part for me. No, these aren't parodies, these are well-done, respectful bluegrass renditions of some very fine songs. That may be your gig, or it isn't, but for the former of y'all, there's 75 minutes of very fine music awaiting you. Now, about that hootenanny...

The Man From Outside - Return To David Bowie's Art Crime Time

I hadn't planned on posting anything Bowie-related, or anything from the Outside era, but, as it so happens, a pretty nice piece on The Quietus on Bowie and Scott Walker and their respective albums 1. Outside and Tilt, both celebrating their 30 year birthday. That piece is right here. 

So time for a little reissue of our own, here on One Buck Records. Because if you say 1. Outside, you also have to say 2. Downtown. For newbies, this is the has-never-existed sequel to Bowie's first entries in a 'hyper cycle' chronicling the adventures of his tough guy PI Nathan Adler. I tell you a ton about the whole project in the original write-up. Suffice it to say, I recently listened back to the album, and without wanting to toot my own horn - but toot! toot! - it still works pretty well. 

But since a straight up re-issue would be kind of lame, here's what's not lame: BONUS MATERIAL! Yup, that's right. If you want to check the original Leon stuff that surely could've given Walker's Tilt a run for his money in terms of avant garde ourgageousness, there are the Leon Suites, the three suites of mixed up craziness that were Bowie's proof of concept to bring to record companies who all recoiled in horror. And, to really get you your fill of the time period, I also throw in the Outside Mix, a bootleg combining three excerpts from the tape that most closely resemble songs and rehearsals from before the Outside tour, including Outside songs, but also refurbished warhorses like "Look Back In Anger", D.J." or "Breaking Glass". Both freshly tagged with track info and artwork for your enjoyment.

Now that's a lot of Outside-related stuff for your buck, which as usual isn't one but none. So, have fun in going back to Bowie's creative rebirth in the mid-90s and a deeply flawed, but extremely interesting adventure in a discography that has no shortage of that. 

And if you are hoping for some new Bowie-related stuff, fear not, dear One Buck Heads. I just finished compiling a new Bowie project, so as ever, stay tuned...

Digging the beauty out of ruins: Dennis Wilson's Bambu

Of all the mythical albums that never were, it's amazing that one rather, uh, limited and terminally unhip band is associated with two of them. Smile is of course the most famous lost album in music history, but it's telling that another long lost treasure to many music afficionados is Dennis Wilson's never finished second solo album Bambu, an album that gained near mythical status more for what it might have been or could have been, spurned on by bits and pieces of it coming out on bootlegs, as they tend to do with all things Beach Boys. Wilson worked on the album feverishly during 1977 and early 1978, before circumstances - both of his own doing and of others - slowed him down, then all of a sudden it was a year later, Dennis was way into hard drugs, Bambu was put on the backburner, never to come back from there, before Dennis' stupid, maddening death in 1983. By that time, whatever Bambu was, or could have been, was nothing but distant memories of those that worked on it with Dennis. Most never forgot a bit of a delicate melody or a strong, emotive performance by Dennis - but that's all they were, memories. 

The great album that was to confirm the promise of Dennis' really strong debut Pacific Ocean Blue would never come out in an official release - until 2008, and even then it didn't. Not really. The form in which Bambu (The Caribou Sessions) was issued made it impossible to hear a great, or even particularly good album, in its haphazardly assembled form. But we'll get to that in a bit. Yet, going through the unfinished work, glimpses of brilliance kept showing up, and when you looked and listened real hard, there were more than just glimpses. 

One of the things one realizes when listening closely to the Bambu material is how much Dennis had learned from big brother Brian. Like Bri, Dennis would more and more start to compose the famous pocket symphonies, songs that were made of of several sections, or movements. Now, the cynic in me will probably say that the way Dennis worked on Bambu - piecing things together whenever he had inspiration, time or a moment in a recording studio - led to some of the songs moving rather incongruously from one section to the other. But the believer in me thinks, that maybe Dennis learned a lot more from Brian than his 'let's just go to the beach and surf' persona let on. Whichever explanation seems more likely, the proof is in the pudding. Dennis was easily the mpost adventurous and creative of the Wilson brothers behind Brian. 

This means that on Bambu you get something you rarely get from a Beach Boys album, and certainly any Beach Boys album after Holland/ Sail On Sailor - the music can, and does, surprise you. Take "Are You Real", a song that starts exactly like you'd think a Dennis song with that title would - like a big heartfelt Dennis ballad. But then,only about fourty-five seconds in, the song suddenly changes, the drums start to pound and a keyboard melody takes over that seems to have not much in common with the slow first part. It's Dennis' very own variation of a power ballad. Or check "I Love You". It starts as a sort of groovy love song, but only for about 45 seconds (again!) before the drums fall away and the song segues into an angelic choir chorale section which then about later segues into a solo piano melody...and the whole thing is clearly a sketch that's barely two minutes long. It wasn't much of a song that's why on this version of Bambu it segues directly into the lovely "If Love Had Its Way", on the official release issued under its working title "Cocktails" though it really isn't cocktail music. Which makes me come back to the way this material was originally released, and how that caused this album to be a real challenge to assemble.

Scrolling through my front page, I've seen that the biggest groups of items on this blog are by far alternate albums, something I wouldn't have bet on when I started thjs adventure more than two years ago. Some of these are really just resequenced or thinned out versions of albums, so while they are alternate albums, there isn't a ton of work I did on them. On the albums that I really did re-construct, I mostly had a precise idea what I was going for: knowing which outtakes or alternate versions of songs I would use, which songs I'd kick off, which songs would be the album or side openers and closers, and then just had to figure out some minor sequencing stuff in the margins. This is not what happened with this version of Dennis Wilson's Bambu. In some ways this is the alternate album I'm the most proud of, because I didn't know what I was doing, where to begin and if I could pull it off.  

But pull it off I did I say without aiming for false modesty. I think this is the best and most coherent version of Bambu that you are going to hear, a real album, full of the ebb-and-flow dynamics of an album. An album with beginnings, middles and endings to their two album sides. But boy, it wasn't easy. Like most people I got the Bambu stuff on the bonus disc of Pacific Ocean Blue. And while I was happy to listen to the music Dennis Wilson did manage to put down on tape between 1977 and 1979, I didn't listen to that bonus disc called Bambu (The Caribou Sessions) - which even got a separate release a couple of years later - all that much. I understand why this material was released the way it was: it's an archival release for historical purposes, with the accompanying problems: Haphazard, somewhat random-seeming sequencing; song sketches that go nowhere and don't have real endings...even when these were the cream of the crop, they were simply not presented in a particularly listenable form. 

This looked like a job for the One Buck Guy. But yeah, when I threw the Bambu material into a folder to at some point give it a try I had nothing: no running order, no real idea how to arrange stuff, just the vague notion that I should try my hand at this one of these days. So when I posted my rejiggered version of L.A., Light Album Relit a couple of weeks ago, and kind of immersed myself into that period for a bit, I gave this a real shot. And somehow, everything fell into place just perfectly. Opening tracks were easy, they had to be the two calypso numbers from Carli Munoz. And the indelible melody of "Holy Man" was immediately scheduled as the album closer. The "I Love You / If Love Had Its Way" felt right as the closer of side a. Then juggle the slower ballads and uptempo number. 

"Tug Of War" was one of the best numbers Dennis had composed and recorded for Pacific Ocean Blue, a typically entrancing ballad with enough little weirdness, slight psychedelic flourishes added, to stand out from the work of a man who did many, many heartfelt ballads. I still feel it shouldn't have been bumped off the Pacific Ocean Blue in favor of "End Of The Show", but it obviously had to become part of Bambu now. The only number not from the official release is "Wild Situation (Reprise)", taken from a bootleg, which has no verses and few lead vocals from Dennis, with the harmony/ group vocals (and the drums!) really high in the mix, giving it a decidedly different feel, and making it the most Beach Boys-sounding track on the release. I just love how different and lively this one feels compared to the 'official' version with these group vocals (and drums!) way buried in the mix...

It's a shame that this music wasn't released at the time, a waste really, much like the life of its creator between 1979 and 1983. With these tortured genius guys like One Buck Records favorite Gene Clark, it's always easy and more romantic to blame the record companies or this and that in outside circumstances (and the loss of his own recording studio, co-owned with Carl and sold in 1978, did put a huge dent into the progression of Bambu), but let's be real: These guys fucked up a lot of stuff in their life, both privately and professionally, all by themselves, and no amount of retrospective love is going to erase that. Dennis, especially, took some exceedingly stupid, horrible decisions in the last years of his life - that life, like his body, his voice, and his music ending up in ruin. 

But the music remains, and it doesn't care about any of that. Everything that made up Dennis Wilson - the unparalled expression of longing, the party-ready womanizing guy evident in groovers like "Under The Moonlight" ("The young girls go into a rage") or 'School Girl", even the self-mocking sense of humor ("He's A Bum"). Dennis was all that, and all that is on Bambu, and now finally in a version that deserves to be played and replayed. He is singing to an unknown female (presumably) in the opener that he is her "constant companion", but really, music was his constant companion in those few, feverish years when inspiration flowed abundantly and beauty followed. Now, let that music flow again...

Albert Strikes Back! or The Revenge Of ReImaginos

Ha! And here you thought I was done with Imaginos, but no, I'm not! And neither is Albert Bouchard. When last we saw Bouchard in my write-up for the rejiggered version of Blue Öyster Cult's Imaginos, he was suing the band and manager Sandy Pearlman for, essentially, stealing his work from underneath him, without sufficient recognition or recompensation. The whole thing was his baby, and Pearlman's, whose supposed betrayal Bouchard took especially bad. But time heals all wounds, or so they say, and time did chip away at the grudges that separated Bouchard from his ex-band and his ex-manager. In the 2010s Bouchard began to join BÖC at some gigs for a couple of songs (and for a fynny cameo - more cowbell! - in BÖC's video for "That Was Me". And finally, he made peace with Pearlman, though - again, somewhat cliché but are you going to do -  that only came about when Pearlman suffered a stroke in early 2016 that left him with diminished mental and physical abilities. Bouchard visited Pearlman in the hospital, and to cheer him up promised to bring out the original Imaginos tapes he had worked on with Pearlman in the early 2016., in a remixed or remastered form. 

It's unclear whether Pearlman was even together enough to really understand what Bouchard was teling him, and he died a couple of months later. But Bouchard had promised to go back to the Imaginos project and fully intended to do so. The original tapes from the early 80s had disintegrated to the point that they weren't particularly salvageable. So Bouchard went to the next best idea: re-recording the whole shebang. Thus ReImaginos was born.  

ReImaginos is trimming away a lot of the excesses of the original early 80s production, ReImaginos is at least partly close to an unplugged record with less cluttered and dense production. partly no doubt to get rid of the bombastic sounds of its time, but also to accomodate an older singer with an older voice (more on that in a moment). Some of these songs are almost totally transformed. "The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein's Castle At Weisseria" is almost unrecognizable, when it starts on what sounds like a conga beat. One of the heaviest, if not the heaviest number, on the original, it now choogles rather than thrashes along, which has the advantage of making out the lyrics much easier than on the shouty, almost hair-metal original (that had guest vocals by Joey Cerisano). 

"Astronomy" is another song that benefits from its more acoustic arrangement, and overall these changes give ReImaginos a good reason for existing other than Albert's revenge and dream project come true. They really bring something to the table that the 'originals' (if we can call them that, given how things went down) don't, so this is not just an exercise in nostalgia. Bouchard at the time was outraged that on top of the overdubbing, reworking and lack or recognition of his work, the finished BÖC album deleted two of his songs from the Imaginos cycle, the acoustic "Gil Blanco Country" - dating back to the earliest recordings of the band as Soft White Underbelly/The Stalk-Forrest Group - and the truly odd "The Girl That Love Made Blind", with its second part invocations of the protagonist's "Christmas Of My Life" and the sing-along "Christmas! Christmas!" chants which make it sound like, well, a Christmas song. Difficult to align that with agent of evil Imaginos' mission of manipulating manlind, so you can see why it was left off the album in 1987. I include it here to not dash Albert's belated triumph, but it remains a weird ass song and an odd fit into the album. He also added a new original song, the o.k. but rather unremarkable "Black Telescope". 

All's well that ends well, right?! Well, not quite. There is a catch to this belated fulfillment of a dream. If Columbia executives shelved the album indefinitely because of Albert Bouchard's weak lead vocals some 40+ years ago...well, let's just say that what was already a serviceable rather than particular great voice at the best of times hasn't aged like fine vine. Bouchard's vocals are fragile and weedy, clearly the weak spot of this endeavor. On one hand it is touching, even a little bit moving, to see an old man return to the obsessions (and follies?) of his youth, on the other it's obvious that age and/or bad habits have done a number on poor Al's pipes. So you have to take the slightly wobbly performance for what it is. The wise decision to go with a softer, more acoustic sound is also explained by the limitations of Bouchard's voice, which simply could not work in a hard rock environment. 

Bouchard of course could not resrist overegging the pudding, mainly because he dreamt of issuing three double albums making up the Imaginos saga in the early 80s, so when ReImaginos became a surprisingly good seller, he got the money and cache to do the other two parts, that started to look more and more like an undiscriminate sausage factory for BÖC covers. But again, that is another story. 

So, if you're ready for another, unexpected tour through human history alongside Imaginos, follow old man Albert for a surprisingly attractrive trip down memory lane...

Public Service Announcement. Or: Ol' OBG Rants...

Hmmm, so I thought about whether I should post this or not, to not come of as whining but then again, fuck it, might as well get this off my chest. And I threw some boobs & beer in there to get everyone's attention...

So , since I posted the third volume of the We've Got You Covered: Lowell George & Little Feat two days ago, about eighty people have downloaded that comp. 

You know how many of those eighty have said 'Hi' or 'Thanks', or, anything really? Yup, that's right, it's a big fat zero. 

Normally I don't mind, though there really haven't been many 'Hi's or 'Thanks' going around here lately, or really much of anything in the comments section. Well, I get it, I've seen bigger blogs with way more traffic than mine that struggle to get to a handful of comments, so this is nothing extraordinary.

The goal of this blog was and is to share this music that I find interesting or exciting in one way or the other. Making people jump through hoops to get it by having a minimum of comments or what not was never in the cards for me. It doesn't work, and I'd rather have some sort of natural conversation - or as natural as possible on that here internet - than some folks forcing themselves to write something to satisfy a random and ultimately useless quota. 

But that is also not why I'm writing this public service note. No one had anything to say about the Lowell George tribute comp, yet there is a comment, two in fact. And let's be clear: I'm not going after that specific user, anonymous and unknown as he might be. It's more of a general thing. 

The comment states that Volume 2 of the series doesn't work. Which is totally normal, I set an article link to Volume 1, so I upped the music link. No direct link to volume 2, so I didn't reup right away, thinking someone would ask for a link if interested. 

Except there is no question being asked. "Link doesn't work" or "Link is dead again" (a comment on a Gene Clark post a couple of weeks ago that rubbed me the wrong way) aren't questions, they are statements, kinda like computer error messages. They state a fact, sure, but they don't incite or entice me to do anything about it. 

You know what would? If that unknown visitor would add a little 'could you re-up, please?' to that statement of fact and then - gasp - even sign his or her post with a nickname (you still can stay an anonymous user in terms of Google, folks). That would be, you know, a little nicer. 

I don't ask for people to sing hosiannas in my honor, I mostly do this stuff for myself, and share it because I think it might bring enjoyment to other people. But if I can't have a ton of comments, at least a little bit of courtesy would be nice. Don't say "doesn't work!". Ask to make it work, nicely. 

It's written right on the front page: "If you find a dead link, just ask for a re-up in the thread and I'll post a new one as quickly as possible". Any major dude around here will tell you that if you ask nicely for a link, you'll have it, normally a couple hours tops after asking. 

Any "link is dead" kind of post will fall on deaf ears, though. If someone's got a problem with that very simple and I believe quite reasonable demand, that anonymous someone can take his or her behind and their non-existent business elsewhere. 

[rant mode off]

Oof, there, a little better. Regular programming will restart tomorrow as scheduled. 

See you then. 

P.S.: Don't be a stranger...

Can you ever have enough Lowell & Little Feat music around? No, no, I don't think you can...

All our series that I'm juggling here on One Buck Records continue to choogle along, so it's time for a return trip via the Lafayette Railroad into the country of swampy grooves, funky rock and heartfelt ballads - that's right, it's time to return to Lowell George country. We've Got You Covered: Lowell George & Little Feat Volume 3 does, what the other two volumes did: presenting you a fine selection of cover versions celebrating the songwriting of Mr. Little Feat himself - named after his small feet, natch - and his compadres. 

Artists trying out their hands on Lowell & Feat tunes include collaborators like Linda Ronstadt and Robert Palmer, both alumni from the first volume, as well as admirers close and far. Some of these you would expect, like Brothers Of a Feather a.k.a. Chris & Rich Robinson from the Blaack Crowes, whose modern Southern rock definitely has some overlap with George's music. But I bet you didn't have John Farnham on your bingo card of folks doing Little Feat covers, though somewhat fittingly he takes one of George's most AOR tunes, "Perfect Imperfections" (when I first heard it, I thought it was Barrère or Payne singing, as that vocal has no grit at all). The Brothers Landreth strike twice, first Joey with a lovely cover of "Long Distance Love", and then with his brother David on a smokin' cover of "Two Trains". 

The Americana front os well represented with Jamey Johnson covering the inevitable "Willin'" and One Buck Records hero Neal Casal running through "Sailin' Shoes" for eight minutes - which was a reason to put it here instead of one of the Casalties comps. Taj Mahal gets the groove on with the rarely covered "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" and Souled American bring a woozy, fuzzy alt country vibe to "Six Feet Of Snow", and then after 65 minutes of first-class Loell & Little Feat covers, Lionel Wendling takes us home on the aforementioned "Lafayette Railroad". 

So, good stuff here, as usual. Hope you agree, and get some of the ol' Lowell & Feat magic for a groovy start to your week...