Tales Of Mystery And Imagination Re-Imagined

 

Sometimes I stumble onto One Buck Records projects under if not weird, then random circumstances. Having already so much music to go through, during my trips to the library I often don't know what, if anything, to take in the music section. So last year, I just decided to randomly flip through the 'A' section and see what I find. And I found the Alan Parsons Project, a band I was vaguely familiar with and had compiled a sort of personalized (but really rather random) 'best-of' a couple of years ago. So I stumbled onto the three Alan Parsons Project albums I Robot, The Turn Of A Friendly Card and their debut, their somewhat classic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's poems and short stories. When I was a kid renting cassete tapes (!) from the local library, the weird, austere cover had always had a strange fascination on me, but never enough to actually take the cassette. And I doubt I would have liked it. So, listening through Tales Of Mystery And Imagination last years there were some parts I liked, some stuff that was ok, and a couple of moments that I was not a fan of. So I copied these CDs onto the computer with a very vague notion of 'maybe some time in the future I should do something with those'. 

Some time in the future then turned into a couple of weeks ago, by a weird turn of events. There is this big book/music/films/crafts store around here that often buys up remaining stock of DVDs and Blu-Rays from what I think are defunct labels and throws them out for five bucks a piece, not a bad deal to fill in holes in my film library at home. So with copies of "Death Wish" and "Smokey And The Bandit" (hooo, boy, here's a film I haven't seen in more than 35 years or so. One of my dad's favorite who had to watch it every time it came on TV) I picked up a film I had never seen, "Two Evil Eyes", a horror film in two halves made by genre vets Dario Argento and George Romero. Based on, wouldn't you know it, short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, that I subsequently read over the summer. 

The two movie adaptations really only have the slightest things in common with their literary origins - Argento's The Black Cat moreso than Romero's The Facts In The Case Of Mr. Waldemar - but the movie is pretty good. It's arguably the last of Argento's extravagant period, before the diminishing budget and bad ideas in the 90s dulled his star considerably. Romero's tale is more workmanlike - also very on brand - but still pretty good. Anyway, having watched the movie - which is okay, by the way - and the bonus material where Argento especially details his love for Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, I was like 'waitaminute, Poe stories and motifs, that rings a bell', dug out the Alan Parsons Project album and before you knew it was deeply immersed in one of my patented Alternate Albums projects. 

First of all, for all you purists out there - as much as Alan Parsons Project purists can exist, I reckon - this is based on the 1987 reworking of the album. Meaning: A 100% more Orson Welles, but also more synths, more gated drums and reverb, a church organ, and a couple of other nooks and crannies that are different from the original 1976 version. Then again, purists obviously will not want to stay because once more the One Buck Guy was cut loose in Audacity, cutting and strutting, and gluing and undoing and generally speaking really reworking this sucker. 

So, what were my problems with the 'original' (I know, I know) version? A couple of moments of musical ennuis which could be tightened up, for one thing, notably in the big "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" suite that originally eats up almost all of side b. That sneaky Alan Parsons doesn't credit De Bussy in his note-for-note recreation of the unfinished "La Chute De La Maison Usher"-segment, but more importantly, that thing is just entirely too long and its (faux) classical air doesn't necessarily jibe well with the more bombastic art/prog rock sound elsewhere, so I cut that section way down, together with other bits and bops of the suite, to turn the 15+ minute suite into a single song suite that runs a little more than nine minutes. 

One other major issue? Some of the vocals! Alan Parsons himself recited parts of Poe's poem "The Raven" for the song of the same name and then ran that through a vocoder, proudly noting it as the first instance of a vocoder used in rock music. Yeah, okay, Al, but what about the first good use of a vocoder in rock music? Because this unintelligible and frankly irritating stuff isn't it. But of course, you can always do worse, like hiring Arthur Brown to do the lead vocals on "The Tell-Tale Heart". The man might have his fans, but his theatrical, ridiculously overwrought delivery is just awful to my ears, so that definitely had to go. I started by cutting out all the bits I didn't like, but that didn't seem promising, ending up with a 28 minute 'mini album' with little flow. So back to the drawing board for ol' OBG. Next stop: checking out the outtakes, demos and other assorted extras that the band had brought out for its expanded editions of the album. And that is were I found a couple of winners for this version of the album. 

Not a winner: The wacky alternate cover of the album

Needing to replace most of "The Raven", I found the demo version of the song with Eric Woolfson lead vocals perfectly suitable, even if Parsons (or Woolfson?) play a goddamn country lick in it. There was also a "Raven" outtake with extended jam section, of which I especially liked the latter part. Parsons' little jazzy, atmospheric keyboard noodlings were thus fused to the second part of the original "The Raven" track to create "The Raven Revisited".  It's always interesting that the other non-title member of the Project, Eric Woolfson, had so little faith in his vocals that they were replaced by a ton of guest singers on the finished albums, when I find his leads perfectly acceptable. Thus, his lead vocals-version of "The Tell-Tale Heart" replaces that horrid Arthur Brown original. 

The band also worked on a song tentatively titled "Edgar", which was about the author rather than  his works, but I deleted the third verse with its slightly ridiculous allusion to "Dracula drinking you dry" which sounded a bit too much like the "Monster Mash" or its likes to me. Since that third verse also had the only reference to its title character I changed the title to the recurring line "Someone At The Window". And finally, from a rough track of "The Cask Of Amontillado" with only piano and backing vocals I extracted a track that sounds nothing so much like a lost outtake by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, a wonderful ray of sunshine beaming through these dark proceedings... 

And this is it, folks, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, as told by the One Buck Guy. Some mystery and quite a bit of imagination to this one, folks, which I'll now let you discover...

 

Remember, Remember, The Eleventh Of September

Two days ago, the whole 9/11 memorial thing started here in earnest with a telefilm called World Trade Center I had never heard of, and a documentary on that fateful day that I had already watched, but still stuck glued to with my wife. Somehow, the crazy unrealness of the pictures, reminding you of the feeling of crazy unrealness when all of this went down, catches us sort of unaware every time, despite now having seen the towers go down and that insane dust cloud - which looks like some kind of sci-fi monster, as it winds its way around the highrises of downtown Manhattan - a number of times. Even twnety-five years, it still seems not quite real. 

The wife and I were both too close and too far away from events. we were both studying at the University of Kansas in lovely Lawrence, Kansas. I remember the beginning of the morning ell. I stumbled out of my bedroom because there was a lot of noise in the appartment. My flatmate had put his radio on high volume, and was on the way of leaving, just telling me that something had happened in New York, some sort of attack. And off he went. My flatmate was from Pakistan, and I believe going to join his friends and fellowcountrymen to lay low together somewhere. A thing to know about Lawrence, Kansas: It is easily the most cosmopolitan, international and idiosyncratic plce in all of the state of Kansas. Or as our buddy George - weed-smoking, tax-evading, barstool-philosophizing George - would say, "an island of sanity in an ocean of madness". his is probably the only place in Kansas were a 6"1 Asian drag ueen (probably 6"2 in hgh heels) could walk in full makeup, wig, dress and, yes, high heels through town without being bothered. I alwys thought. 'that lady/gentleman' goes ten miles out of city limits in any direction and we'll find him/her beaten to a bloody pulp in some street corner'. But not in Lawrence. 

And yet, and yet, for two or three days in Spetember 2001, dozens if not more international students - especially those from middle-eastern countries - laid low and stayed out of sight, for fear of some entirely unwarrated redneck retribution. Anyway, so there I was, left n the appartment, with only my flatmate's crappy radio-alarm clock as a source of information (I had a Tv, but only with a DVD player attached to it). So I sat all morning on my flatmate's bed, in front of that horrible-sounding pievce of crap radio, trying to make sense of somehthing that didn't make sense. I'm probably not the only one who had that thought, but I was thinking of Orson Welles' famous/infamous The War Of The Worlds radio play that have people believe that a Mrtian invasion was imminent. Could this stuff be real? It didn't help, that the radio reporting was as chaotic as almost everything else that day. They didn't know how many planes had been kidnapped, and how many planes were still in the air. I don't remember hearing te news of the towers fall, but that's because the rest of the morning is kind of a blur. I remember how I felt, but not what I heard or how much of it computed. 

It was probably around lunch time that I finally took my bike to drive on campus. They had put up televisions in the majority of university buildings, but by that time they had decided to stop sowing newscasts on them, as they felt it would only upset people and make a volatile situation even more volatile. That is also why neither me nor the wife had seen the towers go down, or any of the other events. I only for the first time saw the images a year later, when the first anniversary came up, and documentaries and memorial specials would fill up the screens the second week of September. I don't know why, maybe because it felt too ghoulish, but I had never looked up the moving pictures of the day's events. I read a ton of internet nd newspaper coverage on it, but other thn still pictures, I hadn't seen much of 9/11. So wwhen I saw the pictures for the first time a year later, I was floored. If things had seemed unreal in front of that crappy alarm-clock radio, they didn't look more real in moving pictures. Quite the opposite, the moving picturs somehow looked even less real than the confused radio reports I heard on the day itself. Even now, 25 years later, these pictures look like they got beamed in from an alternative dimension, if not for the recognizable early-2000s clothing and what not. 

I didn't think I'd write something about 9/11, but this stuff wants out, onto a page, so there it is. And so it makes sense to propose to you today the re-issue of my reworked version of Springsteen's The Rising. Until earier this year I had never really listened to the lyrics of that title song in detail, but then I heard a bootlegged version of a concert evrsion with a gospel choir, which was quite impressive, and for the first time in twenty years or so I took the booklet to The Rising and really looked at the lyrics. Somehow, I had fallen in the same Bruce trap that all those people misunderstanding "Born In The U.S.A." had fallen into. I had never really put the dots on the i's on that one, so when I reread it and realized that the titular rising is the dying protagonist's soul rising to heaven, I was like, 'dammit Bruce, you and your catchy choruses, you got me on that one'. 

I also realized that at least to my mind, a trilogy of The Rising's songs talk about the same unknown firefighter. "Into The Fire", "You're Missing" and "The Rising" seem to me about the same man, perishing in the fire. His wido comforts herself with his courage and cnviction in "Into The Fire", then lists all the things hat have changed or stay the same in his absence in his absence, then we go back to the oment he perishes in "The Rising". Whether you share or agree with that interpretation is bside the point, I think, the songwriting and observations on the best parts of The Rising - which are all left on my edited version of the album - are impressive, and anyone who still poo-poos Springsteen as a songwriter or storyteller, I really don' know what to tell you. 'Fuck off', probably. 

So, have a drink for the ones we lost, 25 years ago, in the time beteween, just now. And come on up for the Rising, come on up for the Rising tonight...

Bing! Bang! Boom! Bluegrass! Chartbusters!

Bluegrass fiends, you have not been forgotten. I'm surprised to find that it's been almost a month since our last volume, but of course our Bluegrass Chartbusters series will continue unabated, and here's Vol. 14, another volume that has been reworked a numbe rof times and probably doesn't resemble its original incarnation in the slightest. This can of course only be positive, because I found tons of cool stuff that I wanted to bring to you first, and this volume doesn't disappoint! After sitting out the volume, The Brothers Comatose are back with a vengeance...and a great cover of "Mercedes Benz" to boot! Della Mae are back with an equally wonderful version of "No Rain", a song that, as further reserach for the series has shown, is very propular among bluegrass bands. Dierks Bentley, normally not a Bluegrass player, sings U2"s "Pride (In The Name Of Love)", and boy has he brought some back up, enlisting both the Punch Brothers and genre legened Dl McCoury. 

As for newcomers, here's the first appearance of Holler Choir with "Heart-Shaped Box". I was ready to call them a one-off, but the latest expansion wave has brought some more Holler Choir tracks, so these guys will be back. The same is true for We Banjo 3, a now defunct Irish group who - in order to do justive to Tom Petet's "Wildflowers" - recruited Kiana June and Steve Ferrone for backup. I'm not the huget Old Crow Medicine Show fan, but they're debuting here in a backup function - lots of collabs on this one, as you might have noticed - as they are supporting Molly Tuttle and her beautiful take on Uncle Neil's "Helpless". 

Also making their first series appearance is Duluth's own Trapled By Turtles, an Americana group that play all kinds of country-inspired music, and only very rarely dabbles in Bluegrass, but often enough to record their fine cover of "Where Is My Mind?", which means that - somehat improbably - The Pixies are now joining the list of artists being covered. Other artists covered for the first time: Scotland's own Franz Fredinand via Cornbread Red's "Take Me Out" and Howard Jones via Love Canon's "Things Will Only Get Better". 

What else do we have here: Vets Iron Horse covering not one, not to, but three classics ("Sweet Child O' Mine", "Proud Mary" and "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"!  David Lee Roth covering himself, again, gicing Jamie's Cryin'" a bluegrass makeover with the help of The John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band. And more! So, 20 fine handpicked tracks, showing once again the genre's elasticity in bringing these pop, rock, folk and reggae songs to life...

(Almost A) One Album Wonder: Summer's Almost Gone, As Blissfully Told By Al Manfredi

Al Manfredi is one of those glorious also-ran's and never-was's of the music industry, writing and recoring usic almost all of his life, yet never coming close to a career in music or hell, even to get his work published correctly. I initially stumbled onto Al Manfredi and the song "Blue Gold" while hunting little-known songs of the 1970s for the All Pearls, No Swine series, for which "Blue Gold" with its main stream soft rock sheen seemed almost too soft and fuzzy. Still, the song showed up on volume 14 of the series, though it still took me a bit of time to check out more of Al Manfredi. Well, what little more there is. As indicated by the title, Manfredi never managed to even issue a full-length album, the closest he came was to gather a couple of his strongest compositions and privately finance and press a hundred copies of a self-titled six-song EP, not necessarily to sell, but to send to record company people and DJs as a marketing tool. This included the fabulous "Of The Sea" as its opening track, "I Don't Live Today", "Five, Six", the aforementioned "Blue Gold" as side two opener, "Foggy Night" and "Empty Of Your Possession"

Hailing from San Clemente, Manfredi had, as a teenager, started garage band The Nuts & Bolts, shortly after renamed The Lost & Found (who, incidentally are not the same as a Houston-based garage rock band of the same name), who then recorded a one-off single during a one-year stay in Phoenix in late 1966 and early 1967. Back in San Clemente, The Lost & Found started to get...lost. Manfredi's closest band mate Mike Ingram was found hanged under suspicious circumstances, aged 17. Manfredi took a couple of months-long sabbatical in New York to chnage his ideas, then upon returning to California started a new band with old Lost & Found drummer Mike Ryer, only to have Ryer succumb to cancer at only 19 years old. Manfredi quit the band scene altogether and began running the family's music store in Garden Grove, future birthplace of The Offspring. 

But Manfredi kept writing and recording, until he had that EP, or mini-album, ready in 1973. Manfredi's mini-album has the same feel as Brian Wilson's melancholic assertions that summer and its fun, fun, fun can't last forever. It didn't have a real album cover, just a blank white sleeve with a tiny sticker with name and a picture of the artist. The archival release from 2019 added a title, Blue Gold, and a wonderful image of Manfredi with his young son in his arms, standing by the ocean. It was never planned as an album cover shot, but is just wonderful and captures the feeling of the recording incredibly well. 

To try to fill up the original six-track line-up to a full album-length endeavor I used some other songs and demos he recorded (probably, obviously there are no real recording dates or such listed) around the same time, but as the demos especially were kind of rambling, I edited both "Never With You" and "Let It Alone" for better flow and listenability, and better fit amongst its more polished brethren. Now, Blue Gold is still pretty short for an album, clocking in at nine tracks and a little more than thirty minutes, more or less barely getting to the industry standard of fifteen minutes of music per side. But, more importantly, it feels like a real album now. Then again, especially in country music (and in pop music, if you were the Beach Boys) groups and artists would still regularly bring in albums at less than 30 minutes. 

Manfredi's dreams of making it in the music business might have flown away on the ocen breeze, but the man always stuck with music, writing and occasionally homerecording, while the failure to make it as a music man unfortunately might have contributed to Manfredi's uneasy relationship with alcohol, which in turn probably contributed to his relatively early death in 1995. Al's son Alex Manfredi  - the very kid on the cover - grew up to be hip hop producer Exile. 

Blue Gold has touches of AOR (as on "Blue Gold"), as well as slight touches of psychedelia. Acoustic guitars dominate the recording. It's a wonderful, sunburned, blissed-out little record, sounding as unfinished as Manfredi's music career turned out to be, but also fresh and engaging. There might not have been much of Al Manfredi's music that made it out of his mind or his tape recorders, but what little did come out, is worth of rediscovery. So start (re)discovering now...

Summer Sun Has Turned To Rain Over Here...But We Got Sunshine (Reggae) In Our Heads....

 

...and no, by that I don't mean the novelty hit by Danish (of all people) duo Laid Back, but more of our Reggae Chartbusters, obviously. The sun might be temporarily hiding on my part of the globe, but that on't stop us from haring some sweet reggae sounds recalling past favorites. (Actually, today the sun is out after three days of rainy and rainy-ish days, but I'm sticking with my headline, dammit!). Same M.O. as last tim, folks. More or less the same line-u of studio projects and guns-for-hire that Argentine cheapo label Music Brokers could find, but the fun side of this still comes through plenty. I'm, as with volume one, taken with the contributions of Pinky Dread and Natty Bong, and think General Soundbwoy's version of "The Scientist" is another highlight.

As with volume one, I added a couple of outsiders to the Vintage Reggae Café stuff, including Dread Zeppelin's cover of "Kashmir", the Easy Star All-Stars taking on The Beatles and David Bowie and of course UB40, whose token Chartbuster this time around is their cover of "Red Red Wine", which for many years I only associated with this band and not Neil Diamond.

This was the original album cover, but for some reason it didn't want to attach itself to some tracks or play on all Multimedia Players so I made a second version that hopefully works, and you get this bonus cover to look at, uh, the beautiful ocean in the background there. Certainly, don't let anything in the foreground distract ya, eh...

So, more Reggae Chartbusters for the end of the summer (heaven help us, the new school year is just around the corner), so I think I'll pack in the series for the time being and bring them out of mothballs next summer for the last two volumes. Unless, you know, you are hundreds dozens two or three who don't want to wait so long. Let me know, put this on, and enjoy some sunshine reggae, with or without sunshine, wherever you are...

Yes, Yes...I Haven't Forgotten You

When the first part of this lil' project came out in May, I more or less isinuated that that wasn't the end of the story. Because, while I also insinuated - rightfully so, I'd say - that that album tells it's own story, it waasn't the end of the story. Knowing I could not fit all favorites of Yes on a single disc, YEsterdays was always conceived as a two-dis adventure. But as a sort of test balloon I sent out disc one as it's own thing, and now it's time to complete the mess adventure. 

If you remember, the original plan was an uninterrupted megamix with lots of linking sections taken fromlonger works, but halfway through I changed my mind. The linking sections remain, so you"ll have soe bits that don't sound like you might remember them. I also did some associations that seemed obvious to me, like pairing up one of Drama's highlights, "Tempus Fugit" with "Würm" [sic!], the ending section of "Starship Trooper" or ending with the last section of "Machine Messiah" fused to a reprise of "We Can Fly", which brings the YESterdays somewhat full circle - the first real track on volume one after the short prologue of "Vevey's Theme" was "We Can Fly", so circling back to it, albeit briefly, for the finale, seemed a neat idea. 

And of course  I might have edited some stuff out. I don't recall what or where in detail, but I can see that "Perpetual Change" lost about three minutes, and "Yours Is No Disgrace" about three minutes and a half, presumably of stuff I wasn't in love with. So, as usual: proceed at your on risk and peril. But you might to hear some of Yes' finest - according to ol' OBG, of course - in a new context or with new neighbours. There are a ton of classics present here, along with the aforementioned - "Siberian Khatru", "And You And I", "Turn Of The Century", "Yours Is No Disgrace", and more. I even found place for the proggiest of Trevor Rabin-era megaseller's 90125 proggiest and possibly best track, "Hearts". As usual, flow was importat to me, so again, here's hoping that for ypu this flows as nicely as it does for me.

And, well, that's it. That concludes this blog's adventures in Yes Land for now. So get ready for about an hour twenty of some of the best bits that Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and the  rest of the crew have produced. Revel in some YESterdays, and then, as ever, it's off into the future. 

Goodbye, Dolly - From A Faraway Distance, And A Recent Admirer

I honestly can't say I have much of a relationship with Dolly Parton's music, of which I have only heard a song here or there. I of course knew the ridiculous image of Dolly - big hair, big boobs, big voice nd attitude. But I didn't listen much to her music and I didn't know much about her. That chnaged a couple of months ago, when - while zapping aimlessly with the wife in tow, yes, some people still watch TV! - we fell on a music documentary whose subject I don't recall, might have been Bowie. Right after, however, we segued straight into a documentary on Dolly Parton, and I increased my knowledge, not to mention my appreciation of here, manyfold. 

Talk about a self-made millionaire or going from rags to riches. These are often used as metaphors, but rarely have they applied to somebody as well as Dolly Parton. Born in a wooden shack to dirt-poor parents and part of a family counting a dozen children, Dolly's upbringing was clearly the stuff normally reserved for screenplays. The way she managed to hold herself in  male-dominated business in the 60's, the way she looked for more freedom away from Porter Wagoner, all this stuff - just impressive as hell. And that is before you take into account her charity work, and the sense that she just had kind words for everyone, even those that didn't have any for her. That list of 'big somethings' I did in the paragraph above? It's fair to say that 'big heart' needs to be added and underlined a couple of times. In bright, trashy pink, if Dolly had her way. 

The wife and I stayed glued to that documentary, and then - somehow transfixed by the country mood watched half of a concert by the Highwaymen that followed the Parton doc, until at about 1.15 A.M. I told my wife that it would probably wise to pack it in. I had put 'check out more Dolly Parton' on the imaginaryt to do-list, as I was mostly familiar with her as part of the Trio albums with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. And then I never really got around to do that, with so much other music and other things taking precedence. So Dolly's death two days ago, at age 80, doesn't strike me really on a personal level, and i won't pretend that it does. But it's fair to say that our world just got a good bit poorer without Dolly in it. 

The One Buck Album of the day, Coat Of Many Colors, is a classic by Dolly Parton, including the title song that Dolly herself considered her favorite, from among the hundreds and hundreds of songs she wrote. It also came out at an impressively active time for Parton, being her third album of 1971 after The Golden Streets Of Glory and Joshua. This is the 2007 remaster with four bonus tracks. The cover still looks kind of weird (and makes Dolly somewhat look like anboy), but hey, that can't do any harm to the fab content. Just a fine little album to remember this giant of country music by. 

R.I.P. Dolly Rebecca Parton, 1946-2026