OBG's Antique store offers Bonnie's Beforehand's Best...

Here's an idea for a fun party game. You take some deep cuts from Rod Stewart and Bonnie Tyler, play a ten or fifteen snippet of it and then your guests have to guess. Is it Roddy? Is it Bonnie? Their voices are so alike that without being an expert in both artists' catalogue, you just might get fooled. On a visit to my parents (already a good long while ago) they played me some music in hopes that I might guess what it is. "Uh...is that Bonnie Tyler?!" I asked, which, duh, it wasn't. Turns out it was one of Rod's Great American Songbook series, which is pretty awful all in all considered. I mean, do we really need Rod the Mod soft-sing his way through Gershwin and others? 

So, here's the thing. We can all hate on Stewart's mid-career choices, starting with Atlantic Crossing. His shameless trend-chasing, disco-embracing, mainstream-caving music of the late 70s and early 80s hasn't aged terribly well. I can't hate it too much, because this is the Rod of my childhood, the Rod that would get played on the MOR/AOR station my parents would listen to in the car and at home. But yeah...at least Rod, along with his time in the Faces, still has that handful of albums on Mercury that started his solo career. These are genuinely good to great albums, as I would find out later, and even the biggest Rod-haters have to admit that he was up to some fine stuff on those discs...

I'm not sure Bonnie Tyler ever got the same benefit of a doubt. Like with the Rodster, I mainly knew Bonnie from her mid-80s to early-90s MOR hits, because that was what was played on the radio. Only much later, a couple of years ago, did I realize that Tyler also has a secret stash of early solo albums that are much better than her reputation from "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" onwards would suggest. So this is where the One Buck Record of the day, Really Cool Antiques come in. Because those old songs from good ol' Bonnie, especially the deep and album cuts surrounding the two major hits "It's A Heartache" and "Lost In France" are much better than one would think. 

If, say, you wouldn't believe that a blond Welsh woman named Gaynor Hopkins could do justice to Stevie Wonder's "Living For The City", then listen to this and be proven wrong. She also has great covers of "(You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman" and "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" and even does a really lovely version of Tom Petty's "Louisiana Rain". But more than a talented interpreter of others' famous songs, it's some of the originals here that deserve attention. Her managers Ronnie Scott and Steve Wolfe wrote the lion's share of the original songs for her tenure at RCA, often also co-producing her records. None of these are necessarily great songs, but they are a very fine mix of country-ish and vaguely r&b-ish pop songs. "My!My! Honeycomb", a 1976 non-album single and the opener here, gives a good indication of whether you'll like this or not. 

So, Really Cool Antiques hopefully does for Bonnie Tyler what one of the many Mercury compilations did for Rod Stewart: Remind you that before the glitzy and sometimes chintzy stuff towards the middle of their career they had some good years, good albums and good songs. Some really cool antiques, if you will...

Call him Cool Hand Elvis or Cowboy Costello...how Declan McManus' West was won...

Storytime with ol' OBG, who's going to tell you a litte about how Elvis Costello could have become a country star, years before genre exercise Almost Blue got him in a country kind of mood. The year is 1978 and My Aim Is True has come and gone. It did some business as an import disc in the US, but couldn't get a distribution deal there. Single release "Alison" also failed to chart. But wait - somebody somewhere had to adopt the song, right?! The student community of the University of Texas at Austin embraced "Alison", making it a local hit record. Which got tiny local country label Tumbleweeds Record thinking. So an inquiry of Tumbleweeds Records reaches the offices of Stiff Records. Would Elvis Costello have more country-ish songs in the vein of "Alison", to be released locally on Tumbleweeds Records, with the hopes of a grass roots movement pushing that country rock record further than the Austin area.  

Costello is in London busy working on what will be This Year's Model. But, in turn,  Elvis gets to do some thinking. The guys at Tumbleweed Records want another "Alison"? He's got that. They want more tried and true country stuff? Well, he got that, too.Kind of, sort of. And to give the Tumbleweeds records guys a whole album, he's diving into his back catalogue. Deeply back. 

Costello has two very recent, obvious contributions lying around: The fantastic, George Jones-esque (soon to be recorded as a duet with Jones!) tearjerker "Stranger In The House", that the powers to be at Stiff convinced him not to put on My Aim Is True. And he has "Radio Sweetheart", a number he cut as a demo for Dave Edmunds at the behest of Stiff Records. But two albums do not an album make. So Costello reaches back to his semi-recent past on the pub rock circuit. More explicitly, to his time with Flip City, the pub rock group that dabbled in country rock, or more precisely the kind of vaguely soul-inflected roots rock that a lot of pub rock bands were doing. And it so happens that Flip City recorded a song that sounds like an absolute dead ringer (or rather, a blueprint) of "Alison", "Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver)". Plus a bunch of other vaguely country-ish songs, including covers of The Amazing Rhythm Aces' "Third Rate Romance" and Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door". 

So, with the two country numbers he hasn't found room for elsewhere and the best of the Flip City stuff, Costello has the country rock record that Tumbleweeds Records wants. To sound more country, Flip City are being redubbed The Flip City Ramblers, while Mr. Costello gets of course top billing. Yet Radio Sweethearts, the resulting album, doesn't sell much outside of the faithful, and the two singles Tumbleweeds Record launches ("Imagination" and "Radio Sweetheart", are little more than turntable hits on student radio. So, Elvis' career as a country star have to wait, while he strongly rebounds with This Year's Model, paving the way for another country sojourn down the line...

Well, this is where we get back to reality, where no such record exists - until now! One Buck Records is proud to present how the first country record by Elvis Costello could have really sounded like...

Now, that rusty ol' truck there needs some remodeling, hoss...

You ever had the long slow burn of an album that’s a grower? No, I don’t mean in the days after getting it. An album that doesn’t just grow over the first couple of listens, but takes its sweet time, growing and growing and growing...over a couple of years. Rusty Truck’s album Luck’s Changing Lanes is such an album, at least for me. It’s an album that’s been sitting pretty in my record collection since 2013 and until last year it was sitting there waiting to get played once a year, maybe. And then, over the course of a couple of month, something strange happened. Having had its yearly outing, the melodies and words kept creeping back up on me regularly, and I caught myself humming or singing a couple of lines...then had to remember what they were...then realized...Rusty Truck!?

When I picked up this album I had never heard of Rusty Truck before. Nor did I necessarily know who Mark Seliger was. But a sticker promising, among others, special guests Sheryl Crow, Jakob Dylan, Lenny Kravitz, Willie Nelson, and Gillian Welch had me intrigued. Googling Mark Seliger, I realized that I had probably seen the name a bunch of times, seeing how he was essentially the house photographer of Rolling Stone magazine for more than a decade, shooting most of their iconic covers from the 1990s and the photo series for articles. Becoming friends with Jakob Dylan, towards the end of that run, had Seliger pursue his life-long love for country music. Dylan produced a first demo and fellow wallflower Rami Jaffee put together the band that became Rusty Truck. And despite the array of famous guest stars and helpers, Luck's Changing Lanes isn't some sort of all-star revue, a sort of alt-country Supernatural. Most stars' contributions are playing an instrument or the occasional backing vocal. 

If I remodeled the album, that’d already be the second paint job on Rusty Truck's debut album. The record was first published in 2003 as Broken Promises on the tiny Coda Terra label, and despite all the guest stars went almost immediately out of print. It may pay to have friends in places, but not if neither you nor your friends can get heard. The album then got re-issued five year later by Rykodisc as Luck’s Changing Lanes, dropping two songs from the original release and replacing them by two others, which is the version of the album I have. And it’s here where they fucked up terribly with an absolute screw job of epic proportions in terms of sequencing.

I remember my initial, sharp disappointment with much of the disc. Having picked this up in a record store in Edinburgh, there we were driving up the hillsides into the Highlands, and after a promising opening track and an okay second one the album just sort of vanished into a vapor of samey-sounding elegant but sleepy midtempo sound of country crooning that bordered on boredom...”What did you put on there?” my wife inquired for it was she who was driving, “that’s gonna put me to sleep”...and out of the car’s CD player the disc went to then make its very infrequent appearances over the years. I could not even blame my wife, but rather blame whoever put the disc together. Sequencing, maaaaan, you ever heard of it? 

Unfortunately, no one involved with Luck’s Changing Lanes seemed to take the importance of an album's flow much into consideration, as after the first two tracks the album programmed four mid/slow tempo songs which all more or less sound the same back to back to back to back. That’s a lot of back there, hoss. Any momentum the album wanted to build was immediately undermined by a section that invites fingers to approach the skip button. So I did what I do with a disc that has such strange sequencing errors, I essentially skipped the “boring” first side entirely and started with track seven to the imaginary second side which had both stronger tunes and a better flow. I hadn’t started to tinker with re-sequencing albums yet, but boy, if ever an album needed some help to find a better flow, it’s this one.

And it’s worth it. Because those lines and choruses I started to hum almost unconsciously...that happened for a reason. Luck’s Changing Lanes, now re-sequenced for a better listening experience with no prolonged lulls in the middle of things, is full of charming, but ultimately extremely endearing tunes. The instrumentation is rich and varied, some songs like the reggae groover “New York Fallen Angel” with Burning Spear on backup vocals (one of the two new songs) and “Malibu Canyon” are almost pure pop and the only thing that makes this alt country is that Nashville and its radio confections don’t sound like this, unfortunately. The weakest thing on here is probably the duet with Willie Nelson (which gets very close to the ol’ Willie countrypolitan sound), but even that one is endearing. 

For further listening pleasure I attached a couple of live bonus tracks at the end plus two tracks from the follow-up album. It’s interesting to see how they turn “New York Fallen Angel” from a reggae-pop tune into a honky tonk one live. Without further ado (as that was a lot of ado already!), here’s that ol’ twice  remodeled Rusty Truck.

KT's (Less) Drastic, Fantastic Makeover

Some alternate albums you look for, some alternate albums are looking for you. Especially if they have the help of an algorhythm. Algorhythms are funny things, of course, and sometimes dumb things, too. I bought KT Tunstall's Drastic Fantastic on a special sales promotion for my wife, because a couple of years earlier she had loved "Black Horse And The Cherry Tree". Plus, you know, KT as a cute rock chick in a short white dress with a shiny guitar - that lady knows how to sell herself. The album is pretty neat, a bunch of well-written and produced pop and rock songs. But, you know, I had never remotely imagined that of all the  albums in my home, Drastic Fantastic would be on the short list for a patented OBG alternate album treatment. Enter Amazon. 

You know what's great about the, oh, two dozen albums or so that I bought on Amazon that had a digital version attached? Amazon's algorhtyhms don't necessarily know - or care - which version of the album I bought. So, while most album are exactly like I bought them, some others...change. Usually for the better. Amazon has (inadevertently?) upgraded a bunch of albums, adding bonus tracks or - as in the case of our dear Ms. Tunstall - a whole deluxe album version. So, all of a sudden I had a bunch of Drastic Fantastic bonus material on my hands...and that could obviously only mean one thing. 

Short dress + big guitar...we got a winner, baby

The Allmusic review to Drastic Fantastic noted how it was a fork-in-the-road kind of moment, where she could have chosen to be more of a gentle, slightly sleepy singer-songwriter or more of a pop star. As said, the chose the latter, and while the pop production on that album is good, some people probably had hoped for that other option. My alternate version of the album does this, to a degree, by sourcing seven of the tracks from the All You Need Is Mud documentary that was issued around the same time and featured Tunstall playing the tunes from Drastic Fantastic as live acoustic versions. 

Less Drastic, Still Fantastic - as I have dashingly called the album - also includes a number of outtakes from the album that are as good as those that made it on it, plus Tunstall's take on Beck's "The Golden Age", which she had issued on stop-gap release Acoustic Extravaganza a year earlier, but I decided to include anyway because it's a great song and KT's version is really good. And finally, included in this Ultimate Edition that was dropped in my lap was a whole disc of instrumental versions of the tracks. I'm not sure what the use and especially the relisten value of that is, but well, I didn't want to let it go to waste entirely either, so I created a handful of small interludes out of that. Result: An album that is 100% different from the original, but an equally good listen. 

Yup, that combo really works...no wonder I had to buy this...

Whether you like KT Tunstall, or have never listened to her before, check this out if you like unpretentious, well-made pop and rock music. And why wouldn't you? 

The Beatles Trap...And Now You're In It...

 

The Beatles are the most overrated music group in history. Discuss. 

Let the World-Eating Start...with Jimmy Eat World's Early Days...

Well, this has been a long time coming. I wanted to start posting some Jimmy Eat World for a good long while now but something else always jumped the line. But now we finally launch the series of albums from Mesa, Arizona's finest. Like that other punk-cum-pop band Jimmy Eat World needed a couple of albums and a change of lead vocalists two albums in to really get somewhere. And the somewhere is Jimmy Eat World being probably the most beloved of all 'emo' bands coming out in the late 90s and early 2000s. And then, with Bleed American in 2001 they actually did hit the big time. 

The emo tag shouldn't turn you off, by the way, as misunderstandingit might indicate that this is somehow music for teen boppers. Instead, it is some of the best pop punk and power pop you'll hear. It's lyrical content and pleading vocals could probably account for the 'emo' label, but as someone who never was 'emo', I can't really say much other than that Jimmy Eat World are first and foremost a kick-ass rock band with smarts and songs to spare.

But it's undeniable that Jimmy Eat World make music for young people - or at least the young at heart. The - yes - emotional content amplifies and accompanies the heightened emotional states of teenagers and young adults, the time where every romantic drama promises to be the end of the world and everything feels ten or a hundred times more important than it turns out to be. But that's what getting old(er) teaches you. Anyway, I digress. So, whether you call them punk, or emo, or power pop, or simply good old fashioned rock'n'roll, Jimmy Eat World was a great band for a couple of years around the change of the millenium. And today's Earlybird Special will hopefully start the mission in style, while focusing on the quicker and heavier music they did during their early days.  

The main basis for Earlybird Special is their Singles compilation, from which ten of the sixteen tracks here are sourced. There is one track ("Splat Out Of Luck") from their demo tape (just edging out the same track in the finished version from their not particularly impressive debut album), three from Static Prevails, their sophomore effort and major label debut, which has its moments - most of them collected here - but not hinting at what they could and would be just a little later. The one track from their self-titled 1998 EP, album closer "Roller Queen" already points in that direction, as do early versions of "Cautioners" and "The Most Beautiful Things", both of which would show up on Bleed American. There is also their cover of Duran Duran's "New Romance" which for some copyright dispute reasons wasn't included on Singles, with Jim Adkins' liner notes advising the reader to "get it off Napster or something. You have our blessing". well, that's nice; It also really dates the release and these liner notes...I mean, when was the last time you heard the word Napster..?

So, who's ready for some crunchy guitars and some well-adjusted noise? Get the jump on these guys early during their tenure here at One Buck Records and enjoy this Earlybird Special, for a kickass start to your weekend...

Long Time, No Seventies Pearls...but that's about to change...

Woof, time flies. I say that a lot around here, don't I? But yeah, it has been a while that we were back in this series' original roaming grounds and natural habitat, the 1970s. In order to confound expectations this time out, I'll start with some prog rock courtesy of Booth, Davis & Lowe. Usually I put the more proggy stuff towards the end, as sort of cosmic run-out grooves, but hey, gotta shake things up a bit from time to time, eh?! And this is definitely on the rockier side of the proggy side, ifyaknowwhaddamean. 

Sometimes a good cover version can reveal a song. I never much noticed Jackson Browne's “My Opening Farewell” on his debut album, and I can say I definitely prefer Michael Johnson's take on the song. Johnson's debut album, from which this is taken, sold pretty much nothing, but he became quite popular later in the 1970s, and then as a mainstream country star in the mid-80s. He is probaby also the biggest name around here. 

Portrait of the artist as a young man

I seemingly was in an upbeat  mood when assembling this, judging from Peter Goodale's groovy "Peter's Song", the b-side to his only single for the former memeber of Canadian psych band The Cycle. The Hoodoo Rythm Devils live up to their name with the ultra-heavy swamp groove of "Black Widow", while Heaven Worth "Ride The Tide" also lets the guitars loose. 

Another Canuck with another b-side to his only single is Bob Brunton with the mainstream pop-adjacent "Lies", complete with authentic vinyl crackle all over. Larry Groce's "Sad Bird" sounds appropriately sad, while my pedal steel gently weeps. And, in a totally different register, I also really like Eclipse's off-its-time disco arrangement of "Born To Be Wild". It's groooovy, baby!

Words fail me. Just...wow...

And didn't I mention that I usually put long, proggy stuff as an esoteric run-out groove. Oh boy, are you gonna be served here. German electronic ambient musician Michael Hoenig - later successful scoring movies  in Hollywood and video games - takes us on a trip for his "Departure From The Northern Wasteland". It's epic, it's cosmic, it's 18 minutes of spacey atmospheric music (slightly edited from the even longer original). What a way to take All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 22 home, if I might say so myself. 

So, get this, groove to this, tell me 'bout your favorites...