So Long David, Hopefully Now You Can Reach Transcendance...

Ah, what the hell. My wife just walked in the room and casually said, "Hey, you've seen that David Lynch is dead, right?!". Uh. No. Nope. Haven't seen that. Damn. It's been a while we've heard from or seen something from Lynch since his return to Twin Peaks, but in the new changed media and cinema landscape that didn't seem overly surprising. His death? Surprising, though, at least for me. I hadn't heard anything about him being sick or what have you. Just read up about him living with emphysema for the last couple of years due to starting smoking at age 8 (!) and his evacuation due to the wildfire in and around Los Angeles seemingly doing him in. Damn. 

I also just realized he didn't do anything for a decade between Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return. Double Damn. Then again, I hated Inland Empire with a passion back in the day and had sort of crossed Lynch off my priority list. Still, not knowing that makes me grumpy. Because while I'm not the biggest Lynch fan on the planet, there are a bunch of films from him that I like or love. Mulholland Drive is fantastic. Blue Velvet is a deranged classic. Hell, I even like his version of Dune and Lost Highway, despite the latter being utterly baffling, no matter how you slice it. I can't really get on board with Wild At Heart and - I might have mentioned it - I hate hate hate Inland Empire, that long ugly-as-hell insane torture device of a film. But yeah, if you were a budding cineaste like I was in the mid 90s there's no way that your education didn't include some David Lynch. 

So. I obviously had planned something different to go up on the site tomorrow, but January continues to surprise me - and by proxy you - with more unforeseen stuff. So, something Lynch-related it is. I had foreseen to post my version of the The Music Of David Lynch album at some point, so obviously 'some point' has just turned into tonight. The Music Of David Lynch was a live concert memento of a charity event benefitting the David Lynch Foundation that was issued in 2016. But my version is, as usual, quite different from the original configuration. I completely reconfigured the sequencing and I threw off the track by Moby (which for me just didn't fit in with the mood of the rest of the record). Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" already was close to the cut line, but I kept that track for something a little more muscular in the middle of the mostly moody stuff. I threw out David Lynch's "Poem Of Unknown Origin", an exercise in child-like simplicity. Sorry, David. And I obviously got rid of speeches calling for contributions, since unless you were there, that's something you probably need to listen to exactly zero times. 

So, what about the music of The Music Of David Lynch? Rebekah Del Rio reprises her classic "Llorando" segment from Mulholland Drive. Tennis And Twin Peaks channel their inner Roy Orbison/Dean Stockwell with "In Dreams", recalling the most memorable sequence of Blue Velvet. Lykke Li gives a moody reading of Chris Isaak's moody breakthrough "Wicked Game". Jim James uses his finest falsetto to interpret "Sycamore Trees" from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, doing his best Jimmy Scott interpretation. And of course we couldn't go without Angelo Badalamenti, the musical mastermind behind almost all of Lynch's musical adventures, including his own records or the ones he worked on with Twin Peaks revelation Julee Cruise. Badalamenti opens proceedings with the mighty "Twin Peaks Theme", sweetens the middle with "Laura Palmer's Theme" and then lets the evening end with dwarves dancing into the night ("Dance Of The Dream Man"). Just like David Lynch would have probably wanted. 

R.I.P. David Lynch (1946-2025)

 

Meanwhile, somewhere on the West Coast...

While Fleetwood Mac were busy transitioning from one type of band to another to another to another, across the big pond and  continent inbetween two young aspiring musicians were trying to make ends meet. Stephanie, dite Stevie, Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were trying to make a living on music, something that had hit something of a snag. After leaving Bay area bar band Fritz who for years had try to break through but never did, Nicks and Buckingham in the early 70s were not quite ready to take over the music world. Nicks famously worked as a cocktail waitress and a cleaning woman, while Buckingham infamously stayed at home honing his guitar-playing skills. And also, uh, getting stoned on eleven pounds of opiated hash with other music friends/hanger ons/stoners, including a pre-fame Warren Zevon. Like Warren, he went out on the road with Don Everly, albeit on a short club tour. Like Nicks, he finally had to join the working population before Fleetwood Mac came calling, working in a PR Agency. 

But in between these periods of odd jobs and busy-doing-nothing, there was Buckingham Nicks. Nicks had met enginer Keith Olsen in 1971 while cleaning his house, and with him the band cut their album for Polydor. Assisting Olsen was Richard Dashut, one of the architects of the California Mac sound later in the decade. Drums were manned by Elvis' backing band member Ronnie Tutt and pro's pro Jim Keltner, future Warren Zevon collaborators Jorge Calderon (percussion) and studio pro Waddy Wachtel (guitar) filled out the sound. Buckingham Nicks is a lush-sounding album that presages a lot of the million-sellers Fleetwood Mac would produce just a couple years later. But in 1973, with the record being more or less completely ignored by the Polydor PR team, no one would buy an album featuring virtual unknowns Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, despite the added attraction of Stevie being topless on the cover. So Polydor quickly deleted Buckingham Nicks from their catalogue. 

You would think considering the success of Fleetwood Mac and Nicks solo that Buckingham Nicks never got officially rereleased. Weird from Polydor that as soon as Fleetwood Mac or at least Rumours became hits they wouldn't run out to release this. And then for years Lindsey talked about the possibility of officially releasing it, giving it its first digital release, but alas...and considering the terms on which Buckingham and Nicks left things between them a couple of years ago, I think there is little hope that we will ever get an official release from this. The version I have is, I believe, a high-quality vinyl rip. 

This is a carefully curated version of Buckingham Nicks. You can get a bunch more of periphelia from places like Paul's Albums That Should Exist blog, but not every outtake is worth hearing, or hearing more than once. So for this edition I kept only the best and best-sounding outtakes/demos, on par with the album itself. Basically you won't hear a difference when the album segues from closing track "Frozen Love" into first outtake "Garbo". On top of the five top outtakes you'll also get five live tracks from a concert in Tuscaloosa, one of the last to feature Buckingham Nicks under that banner after they had already joined the Mac and wrapped up contractual obligations. They run through early versions of "Monday Morning", "I Don't Wanna Know" and "Blue Letter", plus another unreleased Buckingham original, "Heartbreaker" and the only mini-classic to come out of this album, the propulsive "Don't Let Me Down Again". For an album which sold, like, a couple of hundred copies, it must have at least ended up in the hands of some musicians, yielding cover versions of that song from Richard Torrance and Eureka (coming up on an All Pearls, No Swine comp in a couple of weeks) and Rusty Wier (probably also coming up in some form on this blog in the near future).  

Oh well, if you have some love for the Cal Mac and the Buckingham Nicks duo, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Liddy Buck has two instrumental fingerpicking showpieces, and generally speaking these songs are about as well constructed as most of their Mac stuff. Buckingham Nicks deserves better than being a half-forgotten juvenilia curiosity, with this version of the album hopefully doing its humble part to remedy that situation.

Fleetwood Mac's Period of Transition..And Its Guardian Angel

Two things recently pushed me towards a return to the Mac these days. One was, after moving a couple of months ago, the first CDs I could get my hands on working in one of the rooms was this home-made box set of Fleetwood Mac I had made a couple of years ago. It was a great rush sitting through a disc running through the California Mac glory years. Say what you will about the Lindsey Buckingham-led band what you will, but they sure knew how to write and arrange tunes. Hearing the contributions of Buckingham to the standard Christine McVie ballad alone convinced me that Liddy Buck is staying underrated as hell. But another disc caught even more of my attention. It is the basis of the One Buck Record of the day. Subtitled 'A Period Of Transition', it covers the troubled middle years in between the distinct Peter Green-led blues phase of the Mac and the mainstream pop phase following the recruitment of Nicks & Buckingham. I had forgotten how much I liked that compilation of tunes from Kiln House through Heroes Are Hard To Find. The other thing that really pushed me to give this another look was a chat with an old friend from college around Christmas who had just gotten introduced recently to these often 'lost' years via a studio compilation. So I polished off A Period of Transition and that's what you get here. Polishing off in this case means tweaking the sequencing and making one or two additions or substitutions to the line-up. For some songs I used the single versions to better keep the momentum going. 

Selection of tracks is strictly personal. It does include some of their best known songs from the period, including Bob Welsh's first take on "Sentimental Lady". But really, what A Period Of Transition is mostly about is the genius of Danny Kirwan. Kirwan was the Mac's guardian and guiding angel through these troubled times, even if Bob Welch held out longer. But the creative genius and the greatest moments of this period of transition were almost all Kirwan's. So Danny the boy wonder gets most of the juiciest moments here, as he should. Nine tracks here, almost half, are Kirwan's, including what might be Fleetwood Mac's most beautiful song, "Dust", killer outtake "Trinity", the spellbinding "Woman Of A 1.000 Years" and "Sands Of Time" and hard rocker "Jewel-Eyed Judy", which opens proceedings. Seriously, listen to "Dust", all two and a half minutes of it. Has there ever been a more beautiful tremolo guitar? Kirwan stole the words from First World War poet Rupert Brooke (and yes, he outright stole them, no "adapted from..." stuff), but the way he sings them, ably assisted by McVie on ghostly backing vocals..goosebumps, man. 

A Period Of Transition of course also shows the immense variety of those middle years. There is only one remnant of the tail end of the Jeremy Spencer era, "I Am The Rock" is one of his better Rock'n'Roll/Buddy Holly parodies/homages/thefts. Spencer's rock'n'roll pastiches had outlived their usefulness once Green left and most of the standard blues with him, not to mention that now with Kirwan they actually had someone who could write uptempo songs. But yeah, let's have one reminder of Spencer's particular brand of Fleetwood Mac on there. The compilation also makes place for one Dave Walker, shortlived show man the band hired to have a traditional front man, before deciding that finally that's not what they wanted. He's remembered only for contributing a lackluster version of "(I'm A) Roadrunner to Penguin, but the real highlight of his short tenure was his other song, "The Derelict", which sees the Mac dipping a toe into country rock, and doing it surprisingly well. 

Christine McVie is represented with some of her best and sprightliest moments, including the horn-driven "Heroes Are Hard To Find", "Remember Me" and "Dissatisfied". I mostly stuck with uptempo songs for McVie because I always considered that her sweet spot in the Mac, when her pure ballads could sometimes wander into sticky, even yawnworthy territory. "Did You Ever Love Me" widens the palette of the middle Mac even more with its calypso elements. The Mac tried a bit of everything during these years, and did almost all of it pretty well. 

I was ready to say that Bob Welch got the short end of the stick here, since I'm not a huge fan of Bob's jazz fusion noodlings, even going so far as to call him Boring Bob behind his back, but I find that with three lead vocals and an (almost) instrumental to his name he isn't as underrepresented as I would have thought when I started compiling. "The Ghost" off the secret classic Bare Trees was a late addition to the line-up, possibly my favorite Welsh Mac track. 

So, 21 tracks and 75 minutes of the finest the Mac had to offer between 1970 and 1974. If you're familiar with this, have a nice stroll down memory lane. If you're not, hidden treasures await you. Even during some of their most troubled times - too long to recount here, but there's always Wikipedia - they often were able to produce wonderful music and A Period Of Transition goes a long way to proving that. 

Fly Away With Them Byrds, Johnny And Mary Come Lately's...

 

Alright, some folks are checking out some of the alt Byrds albums that I've done..but instead of going into the original posts...and then maybe in a couple of days some others...here's the deal I'm proposing. Call it the box set deal. In this here post you get a chance to snap up the entire Byrds Alt Album Series of the One Buck Guy plus the companion album Twilight. That's six alt albums, covering the period from Sweetheart Of The Radio onwards to the end of The Byrds with the self-titled Asylum album in 1973. One Hundred Years From Now, the Sweetheart Alt, now has the correct, Farq-ised artwork. And of course, as virtual liner notes, you have lots of reading material in the original posts to go along with listening to the albums.

So, what a deal, right?! (Especially for Newbies around here). Get the entire alt Byrds library in one fell swoop. And make OBG's download link-renewing life easier, also in one fell swoop. Everybody wins! So, grab those Byrds and fly away...

PS: So those last days I have been busy updating download links for old posts, but new music isn't far behind, promised! Be back tomorrow for music involving a British band named after their rhythm section...

Public Service Announcement: Nothing Is Eternal...And Certainly Not Workupload Links...

Which is why I need your help in pointing out dead links. If it isn't a 'best seller' on here like the three albums on the bottom of the front page and is older than a month or a month and a half, it's pretty likely that the link has gone dead. I am happy that some new faces have found this blog and I can see some of you rummaging around my back pages, which is great, but you won't get the music with the words if you don't leave me a little word that you'd like a link re-established. 

So, just from browsing what people had a look at, I've put new links for The Curtis Brothers, The Hooters, Bruce Stephens, Generation X, Beachwoods Sparks and Volume 18 of All Pearls, No Swine that for some reason a bunch of you landed on. So these I could see because enough of you wandered on them, and if you did, you can now wander back and get the music. But if there's just one or two clicking on a post, I probably won't see it, so just leave a word so I know what to update...

UPDATE: I also put new links to Bowie's Complete Young Americans, KT Tunstall and Nolwenn Leroy. But seriously, folks: Just ask for a link...

UPDATE 2: Hazeldine has also been updated...

The Moldau, The Message And The End Of Civilization As We Know It...

True to my name, this morning I picked up a CD for a buck, a budget-line Best Of of Al Green. It isn't much of a best of, more a case of a record company having the rights to a couple of purple period tunes of a star and desperately scrambling to put together a package that can be called a best of without totally lying. In this case, even for a slim 11-track package Universal scrambled, licensing four genuine hits from other labels and then filled up the disc with collaborations and cameo spots by Green. One such collaboration? His appearance on Arthur Baker and The Backstreet Disciples' "Love Is The Message". A song that I hadn't thought of - or heard - in more than thirty years, probably. Which got me to reminiscing... 

When I entered high school we had the wildest, weirdest bunch of teachers, the last generation of don't-give-a-fuck-about-conventions types. From a geography teacher who would give out an assignment, then hide the entire lesson behind his spread-out morning paper to the biology teacher who also was an avid bird watcher (or maybe he really was an ornithologist moonlighting as a biology teacher?) and would interrupt himself at the slightest hint of a bird call outside, rip the windows wide open to listen and then explain what bird we had possible just heard. Mr. R, our music teacher, wasn't weird like those guys. He also wasn't a music teacher by trade. He was a piano player and somewhat of a prodigy when he was young. But life's great injustices sometimes serve themselves up with vicious irony. It would suck big time for anyone to lose use of their hands due to som weird radiation accident, but for a man whose life was classical piano? Double suck, triple suck, you name it. 

I could never quite get the back story from my dad who had probably also only heard rumours, but Mr. R was also the first clear-cut handicapped person I've seen up close. His hands were forever fixed in a cramped up, fingers clutched position and the radiation had done a number on them. They were bright red and didn't look like human skin, rather like someone had attached some life-size plastic imitations to the end of his arms. He managed to manipulate a bunch of stuff with his arms and his mouth and would occasionally ask a student to help with giving out papers and the like. 'What the fuck does that have to do with Al Green?' I hear you ask. We'll get to that...

So Mr. R, as you would have guessed by now, was a big classical music guy. I seem to remember that the list ofacceptable artists in pop music began and ended with The Beatles for him. But hey, I did get introduced to classical music, including his personal favorite, Fréderic Smetana's "Vltava" ("The Moldau"), indeed a beautifully flowing piece lasting for about 13 minutes during which Mr. R would get lost in the music, slightly closing his eyes while intently listening, maybe dreaming himself back to a time when it was his fingers flying across the key, bringing Smetana or Ravel to life.

Someone had told him, he told us, that there is a song out there by someone named Arthur Baker which spends its entire running time repeating te sentence "Love is the message and the message is love". He would enunciate the words with a clear air of disgust. Such banalities! His phrasing was so portentous, you would have thought that what he described was akin to the end of civilization as we know it. He was of course totally wrong. Those words are, like, a quarter of the chorus, and there's verses and everything. Sure, the song is a tad repetitive, but nothing like the sign of doom Mr. R seemingly saw in it. Then again, he never heard it, I guess so, it's almost normal that he didn't get the message...(and the message is love!).

So, little did Mr. R know that we were just on the edge of being submerged by a wave of eurodance and techno songs which really did only consist of a line or two that were stupidly, mind-numbingly repeated over incessant beats. The end may have been nigh, but it hadn't been brought forth by Arthur Baker and his Four Horsemen Backstreet Disciples or Al Green. If he wanted to decry the state of modern pop music he was completely barking up the wrong tree. Then again, classical trained pianist -whaddayaexpect, right. 

The harbinger of doom (according to Mr. R)

So, uh, that's it. A childhood memory from a long time ago, brought up randomly by a track on a randomly picked up CD today. There is no specific point to the anecdote, its just that - an anecdote. But if you made it this far, I'lll throw in some Al Green anyway to sweeten the deal. You get that famous CD that started it all and since that isn't really the best of Al Green for reasons stated above I'll throw in his Greatest Hits (2004 edition) that really gives you Green's biggest songs. Equipped with both you really do have the basics of the Green discography. 

And remember, folks, as the Greenster said: Love is the message and the message is love, from the streets to the mountains to the heavens above. Tell everybody what you're dreaming of: That love is the message and the message is love...

PS.: Listen to "Vltava" up there, it's a really sweet piece...

 

The Slo-Mo Lonesome Sound Of Sierra

If the name Sierra Eagleson doesn't ring a bell, I won't blame you. She's not a household name, until you really know your cover artists on Youtube, and there's hundreds of them. So what's different about Mrs. Eagleson? 

Clearly, she's a really good singer, but those are a dime a dozen on the Tube. She is writng her own songs, which is not nothing, even if they aren't unmitigated masterpieces. And the production values for her songs - both self-written nnd cover versions for a virtual busking hat turning - are impeccable. But I don't know. There's just something about that voice and her phrasing, an aura of something hidden, maybe. A definite aura of sadness that permeates even the happier songs. I can't really explain it, but Mrs. Eagleson sticks out from the crowd. 

In many ways, she is a young music maker of her generation. Besides playing songs she likes on the Tube for likes and money, she is also completely aware that the music industry isn't what it was, so anything she is officially releasing is digital. And of course she isn't releasing any albums, though allegedly she's working on one now. 

Albums are for old folks, or nostalgic ones. But with the kind of numbers that an album sells these days, most young artists bypass albums in the beginning of their careers, instead opting for singles or - at the most - EPs. Larkin Poe were notorious for the number of EPs they racked up. So Sierra Eagleson has a couple of digital singles and a four-track EP to her name. Brush Fire is the One Buck Guy's attempt to see what a Sierra Eagleson album could look like, splitting its twelve tracks straight down the middle between originals and the slow, moody cover versions she made her name with on the net. The covers range from old school ("Take Me Home Country Roads") across some 80s classics ("In The Air Tonight", "Dancing In The Dark") to newer songs from the likes of Kings Of Leon ("Pyro") and Arctic Monkeys ("Do I Wanna Know?"). "Brush Fire" and "Midnight Hour", the bookends of the album, were the two main singles she has issued, together with "Darby's Song", the other three tracks are from her EP Solace. 

This is perfect music for very late evenings or very early mornings. 12 slices of moody melancholia for the season, a cocktail for when the days are still short and the nights long and dark.