All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 9 - Once More, With Feeling

Another day,another sojourn down the cobweb-covered, dusty roads full of forgotten treasures from the 1970s. And wouldn't you know it, it's more of the same! More or less! But from other people! So, yeah, you will find a healthy mix of country rock on here, some folk, some rock'n'roll and for psych fans like...uh...Psychfan some psych folk! 

Only one APNS alumni in Jim Sullivan, the man who mysteriously disappeared in the desert, and was featured back on APNS 2! So, here's the customary introduction to some of the newcomers: Sibylle Baier was a German actress, seamstress and family woman who made some home recordings late at night while the family was sleeping which finally saw release in 2006, "Tonight" is sounding sufficiently somnambulisttic. The Flying Circus - to be featured here at One Buck Records in the future - was an Australian band who started with bubblegum pop but really wanted to play country rock, then migrated to Canada and started to play harder edged rock, as can be heard on "Turn Away" here. Arrogance from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, can probably lay claim to be one of the longest tenured college rock bands (before that became a term), passing through several musical styles during their time, the demo for "Open Window" finds them on the cross roads between their earlier country rock stylings and a more straightforward pop they would get to in the early 80s. 

          Your friendly neighbourhood kiwi. He does look a bit like Peter Jackson, doesn't he? 

Gary & Randy Scruggs are of course finger-pickin' legends, "The Lowlands" is exceedingly lovely. The most known commodity on this volume is probably a toss-up between them and Keith Christmas. John Donoghue (pictured above) was a kiwi who played in a number of known local bands, but only has a single album to his name from which "A Worm's Eye View Of Blackpool" is taken. Mark Jones out of Virginia made one self-published country rock album, then joined the establishment, then finally became the drifter he describes in some of his songs. He'll definitely be featured here as well. Megan Sue Hicks was an Australian folkie who managed a major label deal with Warner Brothers for her album, "Hey, Can You Come Out And Play" shows off her psych folk well. Country Funk were a slightly psychedelic country rock group who cut a single album for Polydor in 1970. "Lost In A Southern Town" from Canadian folkie Ian Tamblyn is from his casette only debut Moose Tracks. MorningSong was a student band from Penn State that made one record in 1974. 

So, ready for another trip down a road that's lined with pearls, no swine allowed? On you go then...

See His Friends. They have nice things for you. Really...

When I was young and had to save up my pocket money or money from being a paper boy to go and buy a CD from time to time (tell this phrase to a young person today and they'll have several questions), I often bought different various artists types collections. Not necessarily 'The Smash Hits Of The Year' type things. I started with soundtracks - which in the absence of even having a measly VHS player at home - was combining my love for music with my love for film. It was like having some music and at the same time buying a piece of film. I still have most of these soundtracks, though I barely listen to most of them. Some, I have never seen the film, and I have definitely seen a bunch of films of all stripes in the meantime. But I digress.

The second type of various artists compilation I got into a little bit later were various artists paying tribute to an artist type affairs. I think my first such disc was Two Rooms - Celebrating the Songs of Bernie Taupin And Elton John. I was getting a huge amount of known artists on a single disc - whatta concept! Anyway, the point, and there is one, being that I've always liked Tribute albums and carry this love to One Buck Records. Oldtimers of this blog and its lifespan of five months will remember that in early November I posted the first of what will be a number of re-imagined Tribute albums. 

There's three types of things that can lead me to a reworked Tribute album. In the case of the Grateful Dead tribute Day Of The Dead in November, it was about cutting down the original compilation to a more manageable size. There was sumply too much music. Another option is of course swapping out parts of the line-up, deleting weaker selections and - if possible - replace them with better ones. And the very last and simplest one is what happened to the album of the day: Resequencing for improvement!

If you have followed this blog and some of my musings in the alternate albums that I post you will notice that I spend quite a bit of time on sequencing questions. And the Ray Davis tribute/collaborations album See My Friends definitely needed to have a second look in that department. The fact that it isn't a classic various artists Tribute album, but rather one of these mixed collaborations type thing that was popular at the time (John Fogerty's Wrote A Song For Everyone was recorded a year later) also explains why I didn't add anything to the line-up, though I was hesitating a bit on adding  a David Bowie live duet with Davies as a sort of bonus track. But yeah, the sequencing.

Clearly, the compilation was sequenced with an eye of getting the heavy hitters on there early. I love the Boss and he's always game for these kind of things, but leading off with Springsteen's workman-like version of "Better Days" was a mistake. Following that up with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora's version of "Celluloid Heroes" confounded it, as I feel that number is also pretty sluggish. So, the 0-2 beginning meant that See My Friends never really got out of the starting gate. This new version hopefully rectifies some of that, hiding weaker tracks like the two aforementioned ones in the middle of the comp, and generally aiming for a better balance between slower and faster songs and known or more unknown numbers. This is based on the French version, meaning you'll not only get the 'international' bonus track with Mando Diao ("Victoria"), but also Davies' collaboration with Belgian singer Arno, who sings his parts in French. I did one minor tweak to get rid of the stupid small talk between Ray and Amy McDonald at the end of "Dead End Street", a stupid idea that no one will want to listen to twice or more.

However you feel about these kinds of albums, there is definitely some fun to be had on here, and with a line-up including Lucinda Williams (who, as I mentioned for Day Of The Dead is on all tribute albums known to men), Alex Chilton (in his last studio recording before his death), Jackson Browne and - at the time - relative newcomers Mumford & Sons (before they turned crap) and the already mentioned Amy McDonald quality control is assured for major parts of this. 

Ray, get your friends and take it away...

...but no one would listen, he walked a thin line.

Tusk probably wasn't what the millions and millions of people who bought Rumours were hoping for, and it seems fair to say that about 4/5th of the band might've felt the same way. Now that its reputation has been restored, the story within Fleetwood Mac is that they were a hundred percent on board with Lindsey Buckingham's weird experiments all along. But that isn't true. When Tusk didn't come close to making the numbers Rumours did (and how could it have?), the rest of the group was quick to put the blame on Buckingham's folly, then urged him for the follow-up Mirage to please go back to writing nice, conventional (or at least conventional-ish) pop songs which he resigned himself to. But during the lead-up to Tusk, while the rest of the Mac were relatively risk-averse and the two lady songwriters plowed their respective fields of established songwriting, coke fiend Liddy Buck heard something different, something new. We don't know for sure what post-punk and new wave records he listened to, if any, but Buckingham was the only one not to be complacent in their multi-million SoCal soft rock paradise. There's something else, something maniacal, that wanted out. 

So, what if the band and the label had panicked a little more and a little earlier? What if their request to Lindsey to go back to writing 'normal' songs came in the middle of the recording for what would become Tusk? What if, to appease Buckingham, the label promised him that none of his work so far would be lost and that they would bring these recordings out as his first solo album, no questions asked? And what, yeah, what if Buckingham had actually agreed to this? 

Then we might've ended up with something like Not That Funny. You could make a point that Tusk needed Buckingham's crazy little vignettes to balance the stately, typically elegant balladry from Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, but there was still an enormous  whiplash going from Buckingham's songs to everyone else's. They might be better served, I thought, by being put together to form Liddy Buck's own little madcap adventure. Enter Not That Funny. 

Not That Funny isn't simply the Tusk tracks all thrown together, none of the tracks as such were on the Tusk album. For almost all tracks I preferred the rougher demo versions sourced from the Tusk box set. If we imagine Buckingham going all DIY /punk /new wave on our asses, it would make sense to keep some of the edges that the band would then sand off as much as possible. So I tried to keep the big, sometimes cheesy-sounding synths, the akward drums or in the case of "That's Enough For Me" his trademark fingerpicking in as raw a state as possible. So, tracks 1 - 9 are alternate versions, track ten and eleven are the remixed single versions. 

A word on the two 'new' songs: "Out On The Road" with its near wordless vocalising is an early version of "That's Enough For Me", but really different enough to stand as its own track. And "Let The Fall Wind Blow" is a very early version of "That's All For Everyone", but in reality it is an almost completely different song with entirely different lyrics and major musical differences. It's also an interesting look into Buckingham's psyche. In this early form "Fall Wind" is still very much in the Rumours vein, a song about being left and feeling terrible and vulnerable. That last part especially comes out very clearly ("don't let 'em know...don't let it show"), whereas the new lyrics for "That's All For Everyone" have no trace of this, or really anything particularly personal. Maybe Buckingam's experiments would have fallen on more graceful and voluntary ears if he kept that kind of emotional content. His songs always seemed to keep you at a distance, which is of course quite the opposite of what Stevie Nicks' songs were about. And we know how that dichotomy turned out. 

Lindsey Buckingham's solo work probably deserved better than the attention it received. Maybe Not That Funny wll do its very small part to get people to tune into his very peculiar way of seeing things, again. And even if it doesn't reach such lofty goals, it is above else an interesting listen. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Liddy Buck...

 

Here Come The Country Dreamers...

Woof, welcome to the longest post on this here blog. Perhaps inspired by the fabulous work on Faded Love, a country-rock box set over on C90 Lounge, I decided to give the whole liner notes thing a try, not realizing how many words this will eventually add up to. But hey, you wanna do things right, you're gonna do things right, right?! 

So, Country Dreamers. A collection of country songs by artists who normally aren't associated with country music. Putting this together was long on my mind and here's the result. These tracks are, in many ways, one-offs, that wouldn't get their due in the miscellanous places they are scattered. But hopefully, in this collection, they do. And now, without futher ado, the songs:

Paul McCartney & Wings - "Country Dreamer"

The track that gave me the idea and title for this compilation. A b-side from the Band On The Run era, it is a total charmer, despite or because of its unassuming nature. It's a true group work: Linda wrote it. lead vocals are split between Paul and Denny. "I want to roll down a hill with you, would you like to do it too?" asks Sir Paul, with childlike innocence. Yes, yes I would. 

Dust - "How Many Horses"

Urban cowboys! Dust was a New York-based power trio, one of many who sprang up in the wake of Cream, and  included future Marky Ramone Marc Bell. Their trade was heavy metal, and they were rumored to be the hardest and fastest band in and around the big apple at the time. Their second and best album Hard Attack, ironically a much 'softer' attack than its self-titled predecessor expanded their scope and sound and included a couple of country sojourns, of which "How Many Horses" is featured here. Great slide guitar work. 

                                                 Urban cowboy country dreamers (?!)

Aerosmith - "Once Is Enough" 

Another harder rocking group trying their hand on country, no doubt urged on by secret country fan Steven Tyler. They of course did it a couple of years later to huge success with "Crazy" and "Crying", but this track from a rare-ish (because only issued in Japan) EP in 1988 did it first. The original has a second section that replays the song in Aerosmith's typical boogie rock style, so I only kept the true 'country version' of the song. 

Counting Crows - "Amie"

Before issuing their covers album Underwater Sunshine, Counting Crows were known as a rootsy band, but no one considered them particularly interested in country music, or classic country rock. It was thus slightly surprising to see them cover two stone-cold country classics, of which Pure Prairie League's immortal "Amie" is featured here. 

The Beach Boys - "Cottonfields"

The Boys were unhappy with Brian's production on the song on Wild Honey, with lead vocalist Al Jardine especially unhappy about what he felt was an unfinished recording, so they recut a new version a year later, augmented by steel guitar from the legendary Red Rhodes. Jardine was right, as while this more countryfied version of the traditional (their last Capitol single) stiffed in the U.S., it was their biggest hit internationally in years, hitting number one in Australia, Norway and Sweden and barely missing the top in several other countries. 

                                     Well, at least one of them is wearing a cowboy hat...

Jon Bon Jovi - "Blood Money"

Mr. Bon Jovi issued a whole album full of songs about cowboys (Blaze of Glory, "inspired" by the movie Young Guns II, with the title song becoming a number one hit), but with one exception none of the songs sounded country in any way. That exception is "Blood Money", also the only song that is decidedly about Billy The Kid and Pat Garrett, whereas the other songs trade in more general and stereotypical outlaw and Western imagery. A lovely country ballad, it wasn't what anyone expected from Bon Jovi at the time, which might explain the truly odd editing job, with the song fading out in the middle of the (first!) chorus. I suspect the song was much longer than the mere two-and-a-half-minute glimpse we get here, but was somewhat brutally hobbled because it wasn't what the demographic was looking for. Even at half a song, it's a great half of a song!

Van Morrison - "I Wanna Roo You (Scottish Derivative)"

A country waltz, as in a true waltz (the wife and I taught a couple how to waltz for their wedding to this). Morrison, like Counting Crows, was always a rootsy artist, but until his pure country& western genre exercise Pay The Devil in 2006 hadn't recorded a full-fledged country album. Pay The Devil is pure pastiche, but the one truly great roots-and-almost-country album in his discography is Tupelo Honey. Pedal steel runs through the majority of the tracks, until recently I hadn't realized that even the r'n'b-inspired "Wild Night" has some of it. The album's themes and imagery are rural, reflecting Van's country retreat to Woodstock with wife Janet Planet and their infant son. Van's country dream wouldn't last, but for one fantastic album, it was glorious. 

Candi Staton - "Jolene"

Coling at the tail end of her tenure at Fame, where the queen of Southern soul did her best work, this Dolly Parton cover was left in the can and thus without the customary orchestration, making the track better by substraction. Riding an atmospheric, almost eerie loping rhythm, the relatively bare bones production underscores Staton's pleas not to take her man perfectly. 

Metallica - "Mama Said"

Heavy metal dudes going country, a theme for this compilation, this comes from the uneasy post-'black album' period where Metallica were not sure how to follow up their bestseller, then tried a bit of everything for the follow up Load, including this country ballad, which is one of the better results of their experimentation. 

Blackfoot - "Rainbow"

And yet another group of hard rockers going country, though in fairness by this time Blackfoot were only Ricky Medlocke and whatever backing musicians he had, though interestingly the guitar player on this is the recently featured late, great Neal Casal. Medlocke's road tale is augmented by some tasty pedal steel. He also covered "Tupelo Honey" on the same album, so maybe Morrison's rootsy classic was on his mind when he cut this. 

The Hollies - "Boulder To Birmingham"

Some words on the Hollies and Americana have been said very recently on this blog, though by the time they cut this cover of Emmylou Harris' harrowing eulogy for fallen partner Gram Parsons, Mikael Rickfors was long gone and Allen Clarke back in the fold. The instrumentation isn't particularly country, and they don't come anywhere near Harris' intensity, but the lovely harmonies make this a kind of country gospel.

Marc Cohn with Aimee Mann - "No Matter What"

Marc Cohn's cover album Listening Booth: 1970 was a very hit-and-miss affair, with more misses than hits on what came off as a bit of well-meaning karoke. But he didn't miss on this cover of Badfinger, turning it into a relaxed country shuffled and getting Aimee Mann for extremely overqualified support work. 

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "City Of Refuge" (acoustic version)

The original version on Tender Prey is a sort of deranged psychobilly affair, but this acoustic version, released on an abscure bonus single, shows it to be a country ballad at heart, with the Bad Seeds providing unusually subtle back-up here with their decidedly 1960s-sounding choir vocals. In this state, you can easily mistake this for an old Marty Robbins number. Or maybe not, but you catch my drift. 

England Dan & John Ford Coley - "Showboat Gambler"

I hesitated to include this, because this dastardly duo was much closer to country than the other artists here, but their main trade was in a folksy soft rock idiom, a little bit later in the decade with (of course!) some disco influences. "Showboat Gambler" is one of the lesser known numbers, though popular enough to be included in their Very Best Of collection. 

Mick Ronson - "Woman"

And we ride into the sunset with a second Pure Prairie League cover, by the man who helped Craig Fuller and George Ed Powell to put the classic Bustin' Out together, after the first PPL line-up imploded. Here, Ronson covers a song the band themselves covered on their debut album, and it's interesting to hear Ronson's take on it, Brit accent and all. 

And now, really without further ado, the album. Enjoy. 

From Davey Jones' Locker: More Sounds, More Visions

When I finished the first of my David Bowie mixtapes (see September 2023), based on the alternative mixes from the Moonage Daydream film, I was generally happy with the results, but there was definitely room for improvement. It was, in many ways, a test run. And a test run includes oversights. Cleaning up the mess (closing and filing all tracks used and in the running for the mix) I realized that I hadn't used one track I really liked: the Moonage Daydream mix of "The Mysteries" (complete with a snatch of "Absolute Beginners"), which I felt was perfect as a sort of overture for a mix. This could mean only one thing: sequel!

So here is the second David Bowie mixtape, and my personal favorite. one justifiable criticism of the first mix was the length of the songs used, which didn't work for some readers. Some of this was down to the length of the original song pieces (some more snippets than songs), but I aligned behind that type of length on that mix. This new mix, Sounds And Visions, has, I feel, a bit more breathing room. It's definitely a more relaxed, and maybe more relaxing, listen. Songs generally run a little longer, some to full length or almost, and there's a more balanced feel to this one. Some song bits are still relatively short, on purpose, in a "hey, remember this cool song?" vibe. And, like the first mix, the emphasis was on hearing Bowie not quite like you and I know and love him, so I heavily leaned on alternative versions (like the acoustic version of "The Man Who Sold The World" he cut for his 50th birthday special), a live cut ("Sons Of The Silent Age, featuring Peter Frampton on co-lead vocals), a mash-up ("Rebel Never Gets Old", commissioned and released by the man himself), a demo ("Let's Dance"), deep cuts and remixes to give this a slightly different feel once again. Cover art borrowed from a gentleman named Ahmad Nusyirwan. 

So yeah, overall I'm quite proud of Sounds And Visions which came out like I wanted it to. Tell me what you think in the comments, will ya? 

Without further ado, here's Bowie and his Sounds And Visions.  

The Hollies Go Americana

Like a lot of people, I always thought of The Hollies as a quintessentially 60s group that launched Graham Nash's career before he went on to bigger and better things with Crosby, Stills and (very occasionally) Young. I didn't think that they were as active as long as they were as a recording unit, rather than a touring band relying on name recognition and past glories, doing the oldies circuit showband thing. So, discovering The Hollies' recordings of the 1970s was a minor revelation, not because the music is overwhelmingly awesome, but because I didn't realize that they did have a series of albums that generally speaking keep a high level of quality control. But, and that's the thing, not quality control all the way. On almost all of The Hollies' albums there are one, two or three tracks that remind me why I thought of them as showbiz hucksters in the first place. Especially with Allen Clarke at the helm, they never could resist a cheesy showtune, so these are generously sprinkled all over their 1970s discography (and their late 70s and 80s output is all cheesy showbiz tunes). 

But there is an exception, the only Hollies album that I recommend as a whole. It is probably the most coherent album The Hollies ever did. And, incidentally, it doesn't involve Clarke at all. Romany was the one (or one and a half, more on that later) album The Hollies released with a new frontman at the helm, Swede Mikael Rickfors. Retrospectively, his colleagues somewhat ungraciously sort of mocked him for not speaking English all that well and not really meshing with them, but hey, at the time they chose him. And he was a good choice, at least in my book, bringing a slightly different aura to the band for the year and a half or so he spent with them. Maybe it's the Swedish connection, but he brought a whiff of Americana to a British band that had already wheeled through a bunch of different genres. 

Granted, the John Fogerty-soundalike "Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)" already stretched into the genre, as did a couple of other numbers, but they hadn't really made a record that could consistently qualify as such. Now, to temper expectations (or worries, depending on your point of view), they didn't suddenly slather pedal steel all over the place and sing about being lonesome in the desert or whatnot. But Romany is unified in a way that very few Hollies albums are in what can be considered an Americana sound, imagery and feel.  Vignettes like "Lizzy And The Rainmaker" and "Delaware Tagget And The Outlaw Boys" do quite a bit of the lifting for the Americana feel. Rickfors' "Touch", while too weird and arty to be hit material, adds pensive melancholy to the Hollies' portfolio, not something they normally dabbled in. It's also one of only two songs from within the Hollies camp. They strongly leaned on the contributions of writer Colin Horton-Jennings, who is responsible for four selections, plus covers of songs from Judee Sill and David Ackles.

There's nothing added, subtracted or otherwise changed about this record, but it is part of a twofer project, setting up a sequel alternate album that will show up on these pages soon. Stay tuned. In the meantime, though, check out how four Brits and a Swede go west...

Eliminator risking elimination - its destiny is in your hands

Alright folks, let's call a spade a spade. It didn't work. What I thought would be a fun exercise has been bleeding commenters/voters since the first group of match ups, to a point that the last group has an amazing total of two votes up until now. I maybe overestimated its interest and certainly underestimated the difficulty of people actually leaving a comment on a blog. 

I was thinking that even with votes being scarce, I'll let this thing run its course, but with almost no votes the whole thing feels more and more like a waste of time and web space. 

BUT the choice is yours! You want to keep the Best Album Eliminator around and see where it goes? Well, head on down three posts from here and get in your votes (and again, you don't need to be inscribed anywhere for this). Or, you know, don't, and the next elimination is the Best Album Eliminator itself...

So, yay or nay? The choice is yours. Can the Best Album Eliminator stave off being eliminated itself? We'll see...

Does this man look like he'll enjoy early retirement? 

All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 8 - Take Me Home, Country Roads...

So, time for another one of these. If I chose that John Denver-inspired subtitle, it's because listening back to it while preparing this post I realized I must've been in quite the country rock mood because there's a bunch of that on here. We say hello to a couple of APNS alumni like Jake and Ward 6, while simultaneously welcoming a ton of newcomers, including the beautiful and enigmatic Barbara Keith, and there's a rare spotlight performance of Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar, session guitar player in the L.A. music scene (and part of The Section) who played on tons of records from the usual suspects, here with a number that has a decidedly New Orleans feel to it. And we got Del Shannon, a relic from another era, now toiling away - like fellow ex-teen idol Dion -  as a folk/country rock act. And these are the more known names in our illustrous line-up. 

As usual some words on the more unknown participants, as usual self-published acts or acts on mini-labels. This time around we even got some international participants: Rainman is the alias of Frank Nuyens, a singer-songwriter from the Netherlands, while Yves & Serge & Victor are, as one can surmise from their names, Frenchmen, who issued a self-published record in 1975 heavily influenced by American country rock, with some mild psych influences. Truck was a Canadian rock band with Jazz influences, led by Michael Curtis, in between playing with Crazy Horse and the band he led with his brother Rick, The Curtis Brothers Band. Salt Creek, built around the duo of Dan Tripp and Bernie Nelson provide one of this set's highlights, the beautiful "Comfort in the Wind". The Hans Staymer Band from Canada played some mean horns-driven Soul Rock, "Dig A Hole" is another highlight here, a real ass-kicker to liven up proceedings. 

Kingfish was a Bay area country rock band led by Dave Torbert, formerly of The New Riders Of The Purple Sage. The Bronco featured on the opening track isn't the more well-known Jess Roden-led U.K. outfit, but a folk/bluegrass band from Franklin, Indiana (though they recorded and released their one self-published record in the Denver area), centered around the husband-and-wife team of Mike and Sally Yates. The Hilltones were a loose collective of students from Princeton University, kind of a house band who existed for almost a decade with ever changing line-ups of new students. 

Well, and that's it for now. As usual, a bunch of goodness, here where the string of pearls never ends...

Out Of The Shadows: Meet Jay Bolotin

This is the man who started it all. Not One Buck Records,obviously, not the idea of at some point doing a music blog, but he started indirectly a staple of this site, the All Pearls, No Swine series. I was listening to High Country Snow, an underrated album by the equally underrated Dan Fogelberg who will feature on these pages in the future, and "Go Down Easy", one of my favorites of the album, came on. For some reason I decided to investigate its writer, a certain Jay Bolotin I had never heard of before. Having found some scarce information on him, I looked up his music on Youtube, which was featured on a channel dealing in relatively obscure music from the 1970s which led me down a rabbit hole of new suggestions that kept popping up which led to me stockpiling a bunch of underheard and underappreciated music from the 70s which led to the creation of the first volumes of All Pearls, No Swine. Thanks, Jay.

So, Jay Bolotin. Southern songwriter who recorded his debut (and for the longest time, only) album in 1970 that sold jack and shit, went to Nashville and cut demos in search for another record deal that never materialized and then - despite the admiration of colleagues like Kris Kristofferson or Merle Haggard - vanished from the music scene altogether, instead making a career in visual arts as a notable sculptor and became famous for his woodcuts. He also went back to (local) stages, this time for theater and opera productions, as well as experimental films that featured animated versions of his woodcuts  (sample below: Paradise Of Fools). But his music career lay dormant for the longest time. He got startled when hearing Fogelberg's hit version of his song, not knowing who had covered it or that it was a hit. Turns out people had been trying to find him to give him his check for his royalties, but since he left the music industry entirely, they had trouble locating him. When they did, they sent him a check, Bolotin was...surprised. "I thought it would be, you know, like $12 or something. But if you add several zeroes to that...it was astounding". Bolotin had recorded the song as a demo, with the then unknown Fogelberg hanging around in the studio and both men helping each other out with harmonies and guitar playing. Turns out that Fogelberg kept a tape, then dusted off the song more than a decade later for his country album et voilà, unbeknowst to him, here's Jay Bolotin, hit writer. 

It's interesting to compare Bolotin's version of the song to Fogelberg's. The latter's version is all smooth and tenderness, trending towards adult contemporary and is essentially eintirely built on sentimentality. Bolotin's original, entitled "It's Hard To Go Down Easy", is much more matter of fact, and denies itself the sentimentality that Fogelberg's version thrives on. Both versions are great, but very different. Bolotin's music from between 1970 and 1975 has traces of Leonard Cohen to it, but Bolotin never falls into slavish imitation. There is also undeniably a touch of Southern gothic to some of the songs here. Which went with Bolotin's look, a bearded mountain man with a bit of a mysterious air about him. 

The compilation of the day, which should serve as an introduction for those who don't know him and as a handy playlist for those that do, is exclusively focused on the years 1970 to 1975, for good reason. His belated sophomore effort, Shadows Of A Beast from 2006, released a cool 36 years after his debut, has Bolotin turned into Tom Waits in the meantime, rumbling old testament-style through a bunch of songs that - at least to my ears - don't fit in at all with his music from the 1970s.

And now, let the man take it from here. Ladies (what ladies?) and Gentlemen, Jay Bolotin. 

Further reading:

The Times Catch Up With Jay Bolotin - Paste Magazine

Best Album Eliminator! Again! Last First Round Bracket!

So, friends and neighbours, time to wrap up the first round of the Best Album Eliminator. Same rules as before, four matchups of classic albums going up against each other, and YOU decide the outcome. That is, if you leave a comment down there. (And as a quick reminder, you don't have to sign in or sign up, you can just leave an anonymous comment, preferrably signed with a nickname). 

So, we conclude the first round with the following matchups:

Songs In The Key Of Life (1) - Automatic For The People (8)

Are You Experienced (4) - Blonde On Blonde (5)

London Calling (3) - Who's Next (6)

Exile On Main Street (2) – Superfly (7)

So, folks, get those votes in and send four classic albums to the sweet sixteen... 

The French Connection: La Calif' à la Française...

One advantage of living in the land of people who eat frogs and snails is that I get exposed to music I otherwise wouldn't have, though I suppose that's true for any country you live in. So, in this very first edition of our loose series called The French Connection I will present one of my adopted countrymen. I this case: Geyster, an artist that even here in his home country is somewhat obscure, apart from a very specific fan base. That fan base? Fans of the smooth sounds of the 1970s and 1980s soft rock, as well as fans of friendly, shiny electro-pop. But really, more fans of the former. 

I first became aware of Geyster when I picked up California Groove, a beautifully produced French Warner Brothers box set that presented what (so the booklet told me) some French call "la Calif'", a.k.a. the yacht rock mostly associated with California and L.A. The last CD included some modern flagbearers of that style, including a certain Geyster. Geyster was at first the name for a music project from musical partners Gaël Benyamin and Pernilla Grönlund, but soon became to become the musical alter ego of Mr. Benyamin, one of pop's most eclectic one man bands. And I do mean one man band: He writes, performs, arranges, produces and mixes his own music and plays all instruments a band usually requires: guitar, piano, bass, drums, keyboards - it's all him. His love for 70s and 80s pop means that there are a number of covers of artists such as Hall & Oates ("Kiss On My List"), The Alan Parsons Project ("Eye In The Sky"), Christopher Cross ("Ride Like The Wind") and others. But everything else, apart from the occasional guest vocal or guitar part is him. And he does have a knack for writing a good pop hook, as well as for mimicking the kind of music he likes. There are touches of what is now known as synthwave to the proceedings, rarer some loud rock guitars, but most of it is big, shiny pop. Sometimes a little funky, sometimes even a little jazzy, and always stylish. If you have some appreciation for the yacht rock of the late 1970s/early 1980s, or if you just love pop music, then give this a try. 

                                     Oh la la, encore plus français et tu meurs...frimeur!

As the title implies, this is quite the package: 50 tracks (some of them quite short), spread out (if you are still counting in such things as I do) across two CDs of almost full capacity, showing the breadth of his work and covering about fifteen years of Geyster's career, from his first album in 2003 to about 2018. In many ways, it's perfect summer music, so during this cold and grey winter time, at least around these parts, let Geyster bring some sunshine pop in your lives...

Hey maaaan, (don't) touch my stash, maaaan...

The Doobie Brothers are the poster child of a band suddenly changing musical trajectories. But unlike others who either did change directions in search of commercial success or whose complicated group dynamics and/or record company shenanigans caused a marked change of direction (see: Yes, Poco), the Doobies' hand was forced when lead singer and main songwriter Tom Johnston went down with health troubles in 1975. Enter: Michael McDonald, first to finish the Stampede supporting tour, then as a full-time front man. Exit: countrified boogie rock. Enter: soft rock. Exit (after one album of co-existence): Tom Johnston. Enter: Multi platinum success. 

Exit: Me, for the longest time. While I was a big fan of the Johnston-led The Doobie Brothers, I had little patience for the McDonald-led yacht rock Doobies. But in the same way that I was eventually able to embrace the Lowell George-less Little Feat, I have grown a much higher tolerance for soft rock. And you can't deny how brilliantly constructed or influential McDonald's stuff really was. The sound of 1980s soft rock starts with the Doobies' Minute By Minute. 

Our album of the day, however, mostly reflects my first love in the Doobies, being mainly drawn from the Johnston years. It is essentially a variation of the rarities disc from their Long Train Runnin' box set, with some trimming and a resequencing that was badly needed for a better flow. Tracks 1-12 are from 1970 to 1975 (a.k.a. the Johnston years), with Pat Simmons and Johnston alternating on material, including on early versions of classics such as "Long Train Runnin'". Michael McDonald only comes in on the last three tracks, two outtakes from the late 1970s and the new studio recording attached to the box set.

There's always room for some groovy music. And this is that. So, reach for a doobie, or some Doobies, and get the party started...

Americana's forgotten golden boy: Remembering Neal Casal

My first tentative step into the music blog world as an author was a guest piece for Farq's Fake Memory Foam Island about Neal Casal. The piece has since gone the way of the dodo, but it was a little mawkish anyway and I spelled Neal's name wrong throughout. Also, being a pure consumer (a real 'youse bums' type character) at the time, I didn't provide any music to go with the words. So, once more I'll try to put into words what the man and his music mean to me, and why you should know him. 

First off, Casal was a musician's musician and a rock'n'roll lifer. Starting as, of all things, the guitar slinger for one of the latter day versions of Ricky Medlocke's Blackfoot, Casal soon tried to catch on as a solo musician, doing the kind of mix of rock, pop and country that once came out regularly out of Topanga canyon. If you love classic Jackson Browne or the Eagles, then Casal was your gig. Like fellow grandsons of Topanga, the Beachwood Sparks (with whom he collaborated and toured), he kept the flame of the west coast sound of the 1970s alive at a time when the music scene at large didn't have any use for it, or him. Had he been born twenty years before, who knows. But in the mid- to late 90s this kind of music, fabulous as it was, was always destined to be for a niche audience. And a niche audience it was. He could be a concert attraction in Europe and in Japan, but in the U.S. he was only ever a talented sideman, backing up Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson and others. His highest profile gig as a sideman was probably as part of Ryan Adams' backup group The Cardinals. As a lifelong Grateful Dead fan, it also felt natural to form the jam-band Circles Around The Sun and compose the set break music for the band. Hell, in his last years, with long heir, full beard and small glasses he even started to look a little like Jerry Garcia. Certainly a long way from the young Adonis you see up there, from around the time of his debut album Fade Away Diamond Time.  

When I said that Casal was a rock'nroll lifer, that's probably why his death by suicide hit me so hard. He wasn't supposed to go out like this. He was supposed to, even at retirement age, shuffle down with his guitar case to the local watering hole and play his and other people's songs for shits and giggles and beer (or Mountain Dew) money. That's how I envisioned Casal to spend his retirement. Alas, we can't choose the endings we like, and Casal chose his, unwisely.  Listening to some of the interviews he gave, you do hear someone extremely uncertain and somewhat rudderless. His restlessness as a child, when his parents moved all over the U.S. seems to have led to a certain restlessness of spirit. Far be it from me to speculate about the reasons for his decision to end his life, but there seemed to be a hole where a home - spiritual, physical, what have you - should've been. "I am just a shadow on your wall / one day you won't think of me at all" are the first words you'll hear on this album, from the last song he ever finished. That's why I wanted to end this compilation with his cover of Gram Parsons' beautiful "A Song For You". In "Everything's Moving" he fears that no one will remember him, nineteen songs later he sings about hoping that "tomorrow we will still be there". 

In some ways, Casal's music is clearly reminiscent of those that came before him, but unlike his compatriot Adams Casal never slid into pure pastiche. Instead, his albums sound like artifacts from another time and place. Though he was born in New Jersey and passed his childhood all over the place, like those Detroit/Texas/Nebraska-sourced Eagles, there is something quintessentially Californian about his music, from its deserts that some of the dustier, pure country numbers evoke to the ocean drives that the sun-kissed songs from Anytime Tomorrow bring to mind. Unlike four fifths of the state's official Californian dream merchants he was an avid surfer. There is also a clear Byrds influence on tracks like "Too Far To Fall" and the tellingly spelled "The Gyrls Of Wynter" (whose title mightjust be a nod to Big Star). And, equally if not more important, Casal had one of the sweetest voices in all of music.  

That voice sings no more, and never will again. But the man leaves behind a rich legacy, not only in the nine albums he published, in the contributions to other musician's albums and tours or his numerous musical collaborations, but the countless stories of his camaraderie and kindness. Casal was by all accounts one of the nicest men in the music business.  

So, compiled by yours truly, twenty songs showing what Casal had to offer. Listen, like, become a fan. Or don't. But everyone wins if you do.