Get in the spirit of '76 with Spirit (slimmed down edition)

There are two distinct bands that are Spirit (well, three at least, but bear with me here), in the same way that there are two different,distinct eras of Spirit. There was Spirit, the original band, from 1967 to 1971, a tight, concise ensemble built around the talents of guitar player and lead singer Randy California, but also Jay Ferguson's on vocals and persussion, and the contributions of John Locke on keyboards and the solid rhythm section of bass man Mark Andes and California's stepdad Ed Cassidy on drums. That group came to a grinding halt when California accused Ferguson and Andes of plotting to take the group away from him, with both then quitting to form Jo Jo Gunne.  

And then there is Spirit Mark II, which is the band that named itself Spirit from about 1974 onwards. Spirit Mark II was a curious band, not only because it was Randy California and his stepdad plus whoever was available. (We're just gonna skip the weird 1971 - 1973 intermezzo, where the band was without California and led by the Staehely brothers). Spirit Mark II was, arguably a weaker band then the original, yet in many ways I find them more interesting, and they are definitely more interesting for the purposes of One Buck Records. 

The trademark of Spirit Mark II is its shambolic nature, a band built around whatever whims Randy California was having at any time. Sprit Mark II was the band that figured that having a couple of unfinished guitar noodles and some Star Trek dialogue run through a vocoder would suffice to make an album (narrator: it did not). Randy California was a bit like his idol Jimmy Hendrix, obsessively recording himself. In Spirit Mark II, California would often just take whatever little guitar doodles he had lying around and put them to use. Sometimes he would turn them into complete, structured or relatively structured songs, and often he would not. 

The 'found object, anything goes' esthetic of Spirit Mark II means that that part of Spirit's career is perfect for alternate album explorations, a specialty here at One Buck Records. Since the work is so shambolic and seemingly random, it feels much more justified to de- and reconstruct, or in some cases to construct from the ton of outtakes California & Co. left behind. In what for the moment is planned as a series of four alternate Spirit albums, we start with something deceptively simple: Trying to turn Spirit's sprawling, full of detours extravaganza Spirit of '76 into a single album. Deceptively simple because when I tried to actually do it, some tough cuts had to be made. But I think I ultimately suceeded in trimming down the wealth of material into a relative coherent single album statement.  

Speaking of wealth of material. Most of the material on Spirit of '76 (and the one ending up on follow-up Son Of Spirit) was written 'on spec', with Spirit renting out Studio 10 in Tampa to put as much material on tape as possible. This material got them their record deal with Mercury Records, but it also announced how Spirit Mark II would operate. The inspired and the weird, the constructed and the unfinished, sitting side by side in what would become the band's de facto method of operation. 

I wanted to keep most of the album's covers - in the context of the album it sounds like California compiling the New American Songbook: Dylan, of course, as a pillar, but also a foundational piece like "Walking The Dog", a new folk standard popularized by his idol Jimi Hendrix ("Hey Joe") and a nod to the Rolling Stones ("Happy"). That's a pretty good new songbook to my ears. California's own compositions show plenty of his spacey, echoey guitar on languid numbers like "Lady Of The Lakes" or his trip to "Urantia", the run-out groove of this single album's side one as it were, while he really wheels out heavy guitar playing on "Walking The Dog", his fantastic nine minute version of "Like A Rolling Stone" (which starts slowly and calmly, then builds up a head of steam) or "Victim Of Society". That track was somewhat of a headache for me, as it's a relatively generic rocker, so I long debated leaving it off this single album version but finally decided to keep it.  

Spirit themselves placed the bookends perfectly, recalling the upcoming Bicentennial celebrations of the nation, with their "America The Beautiful/The Times They Are A-Changing" medley to start and "The Star-Spangled Banner" (plus a snatch of "Times") to end the album, so that would obviously stay. But I still wanted to program the album as, at least partly a personal journey of personal enlightenment, so it builds to the double climax of "My Road" and "Thank You Lord", two songs that mirror and answer each other, before the entirely reconstructed and funky (when has that song ever been accused of that?!) "Star-Spangled Banner", in another nod to idol and mentor Hendrix, finishes things. 

So, Spirit of '76 as a concentrated shot of rock'n'roll, 49 minutes just squeezing under the upper limits of vinyl records of the time. I think it works rather splendidly like this. I hope you get into the, uh, spirit of this, and agree...

 

The Hollies go Americana, again! On a boat!

Warren Zevon might be the original excitable boy, but sometimes I'm a bit of that, too. I have a very vague plan of what I want to post, but then I get excited about a new project or distracted or what have you, and the original plan fades into the background. Case in point: When I posted The Hollies' Romany back in January I announced that it was part one of a two-part project and had planned to post the follow-up, an alternate album that wraps up the Mikael Ricksford era of the band, a week or two after. I even mentioned that this will "show up soon". Whoops. It's now more than two months, so I guess time to be true to my word. Better late than never. 

As I said in my write-up for Romany, I consider that album to be the best Hollies album, because it is the most consistent in tone, and it has a number of really good songs and no bad ones. I also mentioned that one of the problems of the Hollies' other albums was their unfortunate tendency to always have a number of cheesy showbiz tunes on their albums. And the tail end of the short-lived Rickfors tenure didn't excape that, either, even if that era was mostly a well-kept secret. The Hollies did issue another record, Out On The Road, but for some reason, it was only ever released in Germany, making it an instant collector's item for Hollies fans beyond the rhine. And, as said, there were a couple of duffers on that one as well, nothing horrible, but still...

So, what is then The Last Wind? As you might have imagined, an attempt to make a better second Rickford-era album, one that can proudly stand beside Romany as a great double feature. Most of the hallmarks of that album, notably a slight Americana sound no doubt influenced by the presence of Rickfors, are also here, accentuated by the three outtakes/b-sides from Romany I added to replace the weaker Out On The Road numbers. 

There are more guitars than you might imagine, and they are spacier and - dare I say more psychedelic - than you would expect from this edition of The Hollies. There's some harmonica. And when the band wants, they can sound heavy, as on their more than credible cover of the Eagles' "Witchy Woman". Before being let go, Rickfors left on a high note, contributing three very good numbers to proceedings here, including the new title track "The Last Wind". The Tony Hicks/Kenny Lynch duo are no slouches either, contributing the very good new opener "Go Down, Slow Down" and "A Better Place" (which lands just on the right side of the cheese line), while Terry Sylvester contributes the bittersweet "Mr. Heartbreaker" and the slightly psychedelic "Pick Up The Pieces". Unlike Romany, The Last Wind is a real teamwork and authored by the group, with the only outside contributions being another Colin Horton-Jennings track and the Eagles number. 

So, hiss the main sails, seamen, time to go on board with the Hollies. I gurantee you won't feel shanghai'd, so let yourself travel with The Last Wind...

More drastic measures are needed...

 ...or so it seems, after the last round of the Best Album Eliminator is up for more than a week and has gathered a grand total of one (1) vote (thanks, Greg!). But, seriously, folks. I know you are curious because about two dozens of you clicked on the blog post, yet no one else wanted to post a vote? So, do you really want me and the Gregster to battle out album supremacy all by ourselves?

I was always pretty bad at math, but I use my math lizard brain to figure out a simple lizard brain formula, like 'nice pair of tits > rotten green zombie arm'. So, you get the cheese cake, I get the eye balls back on the Eliminator, and this time no dropping the ball, eye or otherwise, I want some votes in, dammit!

The Velvet Underground & Nico  -  Nevermind 

Revolver - Blood On The Tracks

Sticky Fingers -  Abbey Road

Automatic For The People - Who's Next

So, these are the match-ups. You vote for your favorite between the two of them. Yes, it really is that simple! And now, get to it, before that nice lady up there puts yer lights out...(eben if that's what some of you might hope for...pervs!)

Et bien encore une autre coté de Madame Workman...

As promised, Nanette Workman, Part II, for a groovy Sunday afternoon. As in, really groovy. Because Lady Marmalade, the One Buck Record of the day is Nanette in up-tempo, groovy, funky mood. I mentioned in my write-up yesterday that Workman issued a couple of French-language record with an eye on the burgoning disco market, and this is one of them. But, unlike the self-titled follow-up, Lady Marmalade isn't a shameless disco platter, but rather a mix between rock and funk, much harder edged and thus more enjoyable than the albums people usually issued to profit from the rising popularity of disco. It seems Workman issued two albums with identical artwork, a French and an English one. I could only find the former, but judging from the one English track I found (attached as a bonus track), the songs aren't the same. 

From the saucy artwork on, Nanette lays on the sexy, sultry shtick really thick, Gitchie Gitchie Ya-Ya Da-Da, indeed. But it works. I'm normally not a fan of records that want to sound sexy, but Lady Marmalade is a pretty good exception to the rule. Mainly, because it rocks, hard. The heavy rock direction on one half of yesterday's One Buck Record didn't come out of nowhere, the instrumentation here is pretty muscular, while keeping the funkiness that this kind of platter needs.

                                                   Gitchie Gitchie Ya-Ya Da-Da!

The emblematic "Danser, Danser" is an absolute banger, as the youth of today would say, and so is "Pas Fou", which brings up some groovy guitar work.The 'come to Mama' stylings of opener "Baby Boom" sets the atmosphere nicely for Nanette's sultry Madame persona (and isn't it interesting that she then wrote the song "Madame" for Grits And Cornbread?), and she isn't exactly subtle about her intentions on the relentless, harmonica-driven "Lache Moi": "Je me vois déjà dans ton lit!" Woof, is it me ou il fait chaud ici? "Super Lady" is two minutes and forty-three seconds of supercharged rock'n'roll and appreciable, even the slower, softer songs aren't too slow or too soft. 

So, with this you're pretty nicely set up with Madame Workman. No matter what mood you find yourself in - country, rock, funk - Nanette has something for you. So get groovy, get heavy, get country-fried...Madame Workman et le mec à un sou s'occupent de vous...

Miss Workman and Madame Nanette: The Two Sides Of Nanette Workman

Nanette Workman had sort of a strange career. She moved around a lot, hung out with Rock'n'Roll royalty, became a semi-star in French-speaking territories, but never truly became a household name worldwide. In some ways, her wayfaring career mirrors her upbringing. Born to a pair of musicians - he the trumpet player in Tommy Dorsett's ochestra, she a music hall and opera singer - in the Bronx, Workman was subsequently raised in the deep south in Jackson, Mississippi, something that will come abandonly into play on Grits And Cornbread, our One Buck Record of the day. But her career didn't really get going from Jackson or any other place down south. She had to move way up north, all the way to Quebec, after a short stint on Broadway. She met Antoine D'Amrosio a.k.a. Tony Roman, a Quebecois singer turned music impressario with his own record label, wo pushed Workman to sing in French, resulting in a no. 1 single with her take on Gilbert Bécaud's "Et Maintenant". 

After two years of local success in music and television, usually alongside Roman, Workman then moved to England, accompanying Dudley Moore and Peter Cook on tv comedy show Not Only...But Also. She also stayed in music, lending her voice for backup vocals on tons of classic records, among them The Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" and John Lennon's "Power To The People". A first English-language album in 1970 solo album went nowhere. Workman found more success by going back to French, installing herself in France and becoming involved with 'the French Elvis' Johnny Halliday both professionally (as his backup singer) and then personally (well...). From there she made a couple of funk/disco-flavored records in French before finally releasing her second English-language album, Grits and Cornbread. 

I stumbled on this record totally unwittingly, presumably like about 80% of people who listened to it, at least those who did any time after 1978 or so. And that is because Grits And Cornbread is one of the most popular (as in: replicated several times over) grey market releases. I would've thought that it's probably one of those instances were the copyright expired and the label not paying attention, thus falling into public domain (at least temporarily), allowing dozens of grey market and bootleg-based "labels" to pick this up. (The most high-profile fuck-up of this kind I've ever seen is Atlantic Records with Crosby & Nash's Wind On The Water, which I picked up on a ridiculously cheap-looking grey market release.) 

But the first variant, a tax scam label release showed up not even a year after the original release, so I imagine it was a case of the copyright not being declared correctly in the first place. And of course it wasn't released as anything having to do with Nanette Workman. The whole thing was marketed as a Peter Frampton release! To add insult to injury, the last two songs were lopped off for some reason. My (somewhat later CD) version at least had the decency to add "& Friends" to Frampton's name to indicate that some songs might have lead vocals from other artists (Spoiler: they all do). It's still a total scam, of course. The above-mentioned tax scam record credited this to 'Peter Frampton & The Heavy Metal Boys' which...is really false advertising.  

Now, look at that beautiful artwork! Oh hey, Nanette is even mentioned! As a bit player! Bravo, tax scam record...

Other than Frampton, Workman called in lots of friends in high places for this one. Ex-lover Johnny Hallyday (together with his manager/mentor/'fake dad' Les Hallyday) produced the whole thing, and the band besides Frampton isn't made up of total scrubs either: Bass is handled by Andy Bown from Status Quo, drums by Mike Kelli (Spooky Tooth). Fellow Rolling Stones alumni Jim Price and Bobby Keys on trumpet and sax bring their sound to Nanette's version of "Loving Cup", which does sound as if it could've come straight from Exile On Main Street. 

The homely kitchen with home-coooked meal (plus cat) on the cover is slightly deceiving. Workman didn't seem entirely sure which way to go for this album, so she split the difference and made half of a rock - even verging on hard rock - record and half of a country-ish album. But the original album configuration wasn't an album of halves, both types of tracks were alternating, giving the listener a bit of a whiplash. Which is why this slightly reworked version of Grits And Cornbread does what maybe should have happened in 1977. It splits the album up into a rock ("grits") and country ("cornbread") side, the way a number of albums around that time had a 'fast' and a 'slow' side. The album also has two longer cuts with long run-out grooves ("Love Taker" and "Madame", respectively) so it felt only natural to use these as the side closing numbers. 

Miss Workman shows some real grit (pun indeed intended) on these songs, shouting her way through the heavier numbers with abandon and bringing a Southern sensibility to the way she sings the title song and "Goin' Home". The sentimental "Billy" is to be taken quite literally - an ode to the childhood spent with her brother, who incidentally is also a musician and wrote album opener "There's A Man". 

Grits And Cornbread is a very fine slab of 70s album rock, satisfying both rock and country/folk listeners. In other words, both sides of me! And hopefully of you...

So give Grits And Cornbread a spin, and since it's the weekend, we celebrate with a double shot of Nanette. If you like this, be back tomorrow for some more Nanette, mais cette fois en français! Ca va être chaud! Oh là là...

Ruckus At The Movies: Cheap Trick

You know what's been missing around here lately? Some good ol' fashioned rock'n'roll, that's what! Amid my love for all things Americana, I sometimes forget to mix in something a little more...crunchy. Et voilà, a new series to remedy that (I know, throw it on the pile...). So, what's Ruckus At The Movies? It'll be a bunch of compilations of harder rock acts and the music they contributed to movie soundtracks. And what better band to start off shenanigans than that ultracrunchy quartet from Rockford, Illinois - the one and only Cheap Trick. 

Cheap Trick are the ultimate smart dumb rock'n'roll band. They also seem to be perpetually underrated. No one ever seems to go "Hey, those Cheap Trick fellas were pretty damn good, right?". Or: "That Rick Nielsen sure knew how to write some deceptively clever seemingly dumb songs". Or: "Boy, that Robin Zander really was quite a singer, wasn't he?". All of these things go without saying, but the fact that Cheap Trick were seen as a dumb rock'n'roll band seems to have prevented them from having some cred with the cool crowd. Other than...uh, Billy Corgan, where are the rock'n'roll stars singing the praises of the Trick? 

Arguably, most of the tracks on this compilation come from when the band was on a bit of a downswing, meaning from the early 80s on. Trying to find a sympathetic producer after having separated from Tom Werman, as well as a hit record, the Trick went from George Martin to Roy Thomas Baker to Todd Rundgren to Jack Douglas to Tony Platt, the latter messing up the band's sound on Standing On The Edge and especially The Doctor. The Richie Zito-produced Lap Of Luxury brought them their only no. 1 hit, power ballad "The Flame" before follow-up Busted, well, busted whatever commercial standing they had.

                                           The dreamboats and, uh, the other guys

All the while Cheap Trick maintained income and visibility by placing songs on soundtracks, from genre exercises like Heavy Metal and Rock And Rule (for which they recorded three songs, both outtakes are also included) to mainstream fare like Caddyshack II (for which they recorded a stomping cover of "Money (That's What I Want)") or the forgotten Brendan Fraser-comedy Encino Man (for which they recorded an even more rowdy - and heavy - cover of "Wild Thing"). I also threw in two solo tracks by Robin Zander, big AOR ballads for the Sly Stallone-vehicle Over The Top and the Kurt Russel-Mel Gibson joint Tequila Sunrise. The latter features Ann Wilson.  

One of my favorite Trick tracks from this comp is a pure "gun for hire"-work. Harold Faltermeyer, who worked on the scores and songs for Top Gun got them to perform "Mighty Wings" which is also prominently featured in the film. And yet the single missed the charts completely, whereas even Loverboy's soppy "Heaven In Your Eyes" made it all the way to no. 12. Oh well. Opener "Everything Works If You Let It" (from Roadie) and "Up The Creek" from the movie of the same title (which the band incidentally hates and describes as possibly their worst song) at least scraped into the Top 50. 

But hey, charts, shmarts, right?! If you wanted some big dumb fun rock'n'roll on your movie soundtrack, you should call Cheap Trick and they would get the job done. The 17 tracks featured here are the proof. So, hang up your brain for a while, get warmed up for some air guitar and let's cause some ruckus at the movies... 

Uncle Neil's Trip Back To The Country

It's been a while that I posted something by Uncle Neil. My re-imagining of Neil Young's classic Harvest as Harvest Time was one of the more popular posts in the early days, the first to creep over a hundred hits. Yay Neil! The old warhorses always sell, even for free! So, time to check back in with Uncle Neil, circa 15 years later for another album that wasn't but could have been...

Making alternate Neil Young albums seems like a singularly fitting activity because a bunch of Young's albums are kinda sorta alternate albums anyway, considering that there are probably a dozen or more unreleased, rejected or withdrawn projects in Uncle Neil's drawers, and that he was never afraid to mix and match stuff from his extensive archive with new recordings. This also means that no Young project or song can be safely placed in the dust bin of Young's musical history because you'll never know when Unce Neil decides to pull out an old, slightly ratty tune, dust it off and put it on an album anyway. Case in point: "Wonderin'", first played in the early 70s as one of his hokey country tunes, but never put on an album, only to emerge an entire decade later as a hokey doo wop tune on Young's rockabilly abomination Everybody's Rockin'. That 24-minute abomination was of course Young's knee-jerk reaction to troubles with Geffen Records who had rejected an earlier album called Old Ways, that didn't resemble the finally released all-country all-the way Old Ways. The original Old Ways was half old-school rockabilly, half old-school country. Which, in a roundabout way brings us to our One Buck Record of the day. 

Neil Young's headlong plunge into straight up country music in the early-to mid-80s was of course preceded by numerous forays into the genre, notably on American Stars'n'Bars and Hawks And Doves. But really, Harvest already dipped into it, and once Young had a foot in the genre he never really left. His early 1980s shenanigans - openly embracing Reaganomics, offering the weird electro record Trans, getting invested in the fate of farmers and Farm Aid - showed again how mercurial and unpredictable Young could be, so how exactly David Geffen could be surprised by what he bought and almost immediately have buyer's remorse is a problem of appreciating his asset. Geffen thought he would get the Harvest hitmaker - not...well...Young, the guy who had always marched to his own drum. 

You probably all know already the details of Young's turbulent tenure at Geffen records (Getting sued for making uncharacteristic music with Trans, subsequently threatening to play only country music until the end of his stay with Geffen), so let's skip ahead a couple of years. Old Ways (version two) has come and gone, Young has gone out with a group dubbed The International Harvesters, Geffen has dropped their lawsuit and gotten a weird, pretty bad synth-rock record (Landing On Water) out of it, while Young was prepping and altering live performances from a tour with Crazy Horse from the year before to publish as Life, his last album for Geffen. But while he was fully back in guitar rock with Crazy Horse, country still wasn't entirely out of his system. So he went into the studio and cut a couple of country tracks, some of them already roadtested with The International Harvesters in 1985. Like a lot of other projects, these songs would get filed away and never see the light of day. "Beautiful Bluebird" got reworked as more of a folk-rock tune for Young's 'sequel' Chrome Dreams II in 2007, proving once again that no Young song is ever truly dead and gone, in terms of being issued or reworked for new purposes. "Nothing Is Perfect" and "Interstate" were prepared for a release on an EP supposed to support Farm Aid that never came out. In short, Young compiled a back log of country tunes that sat around unused and unissued.

Which brings us back to the record of the day: What if Young finally decides in the late-1980s to assemble all the straight country offerings that have fallen to the wayside in the years before? That's how we can end up with My Country, which gathers tracks he cut live with The International Harvesters (issued on the archival A Treaure) and an Old Ways outtake issued on the Geffen Years comp Lucky Thirteen and the above-mentioned outtakes from 1987 plus that beautiful first version of "Interstate" cut for that Farm Aid EP. 

Uncle Neil never much cared for coherence, but the One Buck Guy does, so the work from the Old Ways era, including the lovely tribute to his then-new born daughter "Amber Jean", will take up what would be side one of a vinyl album (tracks 1-5), whereas the 1987 material would fill up most of side two before ending with "Interstate", a perfect album closer. I tried to improve the sound quality of the 1987 demos a bit and - as with all my comps using different sources - volume EQ'd the whole thing for your listening pleasure. Cover photo by Jacob Legge, showing a lake close to Omemee, Ontario where Young spent his childhood. His country, indeed. 

On Harvest, Uncle Neil asked "Are You Ready For The Country?". On Old Ways, he proclaimed to "Get Back To The Country". So, are you all ready to go back to the country with Uncle Neil? 

That which can't be killed... (and then there were eight...)

...and it rises from the undead, once more. March Madness is almost upon us, but it can not compete with the one tournament that counts, at least to five people around here. Yup, you guessed it - it's the Best Album Eliminator! Zombie thing that it is. You can't kill it with indifference, folks, so you might as well get a vote in...

So, here's the elite eight!

The Velvet Underground & Nico  -  Nevermind 

Revolver - Blood On The Tracks

Sticky Fingers -  Abbey Road

Automatic For The People - Who's Next

So, Blood on the Tracks, or Blood on the canvas? Hits will be hard, votes will be controversial (maybe), and at the end there can be only four...

PS: For new music, drop back in tomorrow for something exclusive from Uncle Neil...

Peaceful Easy All Pearls No Swine Feelings...

I mentioned this before, but it's funny and a little relevatory to listen back to these early All Pearls, No Swine compilation that - for the most part - I compiled three and a half to four years ago (COVID didn't have upsides, per se, obviously, but lockdowns etc. were one factor that pushed me down the obscure music rabbit hole...). Listening back to these as last check-ups before posting I am sometimes surprised by my own selections and, more importantly, sequencing choices. Our compilation of the day - completing the dirty dozen - has me asking some questions to me from three and a half years ago. I must've been in an exceedingly mellow mood the day I compiled this because this is an exceedingy mellow listen. Beats and rhythms rarely rise above mid-tempo (I think Loadstone's brassy "See The Light" might be the speediest number here, and it isn't exactly thrash metal, either...), so B.W. Stevenson's countrified take on the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling" that opens proceedings can be taken as the motto for the whole thing. And considering how easy-going this volume is, In wonder why I programmed two of the more rhythm-driven numbers (Arizona Turquoise's 60's girl-pop-sounding "My Song To Summer" and Jordan & Andersons's driving folk of "Simon") directly one after the other. What were you thinking, 2020 One Buck Guy? 

Just because it's mellow doesn't of course mean it's bad, far from that. All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 12 offers some new killer addition to the line-up, like Sherman Hayes and the dixie-fried "South's Gonna Rise Again" or the inimitable Terry Allen with his semi-classic "Armadillo Highway". Country rock is strong on this one, whether by beloved APNS alumni like Huckle or new additions like Comfort Station and Coyote Springs, both now almost forgotten country rock bands from Minnesota and Arizona, respectively. "Moody Mama" is a b-side to only two singles the latter band cut. Both are private pressings, which make up the bulk of this volume. Other private press heroes: Christian Canadian artist Ray Marnoch with "I Am What I Am" from the improbably titled Jump Out In Faith (I wonder about the logistics and mechanics of jumping out in faith...), Red Cheek, country-folk types from Florida and Mark Ayers from Texas who dreams himself into the Big Apple for a "New York City Blues". And we pull at least one psych folk surprise out of our hat, courtesy of Frenchman Dominique Droin and his suitable winding "Caterpillar".

    Sometimes the cover art does give away an album's humble private pressing origins...

Folk rock group McKendree Springs are one of the few artists on here with major record deals, recording among others for Decca and MCA, "Today's The Day" is taken from their lone MCA album. Dory Previn recorded "The Game" for United Artists, One Buck Records hero Wayne Berry recorded "Another's Lifetime" for RCA, after having label mate Ted Neeley a.k.a. Jesus Christ Superstar have a crack at it first.  

So, All Pearls, No Swine in a peaceful, easy-going mood...sounds good to you? Sounds good to me. 

Let's do the random shuffle!

A beloved feature to close out threads on the now defunct False Memory Foam island was the "Hit random shuffle" feature. Well, time to revisit this over here at One Buck Records. 

The rules are excessively simple: Simply hit random play on the music-playing device of your choice and list the ten first tracks that come up. No cheating for coolness points! If Lou Bega comes up, so be it! If you don't have a music device with random play, list the five last albms you listened to. If you are old and/or infirm of spirit and don't remember those either, just list the last song you had stuck in your head...

See, exceedingly simple. As I should, I start of proceedings and you'll hopefully follow suit. 

Alright folks, let's hit the rando shuffle!

From The Record Shelf: Meet The Mull Historical Society (a.k.a. Colin MacIntyre)

The one-man band has always fascinated people, probably ever since Brian Wilson wrote and produced his 'pocket symphonies', and while having the Boys around was nice, for a lot of people the Beach Boys were essentially a one-man band, at least until Wilson lost the plot (and arguably never found it again). Then, in the 1970s Todd "A Wizard, A True Star" Rundgren was considered a veritable one-man band. And from there on, every decade seemed to have a couple of one-man bands. At the beginning of the 2000's, the biggest name in the one-man band business was Badly Drawn Boy, who became a critical sensation with The Hour Of Bewilderbeast and stayed a critical and (on a modest level) popular favorite for years. 

But my favorite one-man band from that time, as you have seen from the title, is a young (at the time) Scotsman named Colin MacIntyre, who spent his youth on the Isle of Mull, with an ad inspiring him to choose the venerable Mull Historival Society as the namesake for his pop project. And what a fabulous pop project this is. Luscious melodies laid on top of luscious melodies. 

MacIntyre's immersive search for the perfect pop song sometimes leads him to excess - "Barcode Bypass", his first single that won him NME single of the week in 2000, is prolonged, somewhat unnecessarily, with an elongated coda to seven minutes. But those first five minutes are a hell of a tune, as is pretty much everything here on Loss. I didn't keep tabs on MacIntyre or Mull Historical Society afterwards. But from time to time, when the mood is right for some lush pop, I return to Loss. 

For once, I'll leave things short and sweet and instead direct you to Mr. MacIntyre and Loss. It won't be yours, if you check it out...

David Bowie's Art-Crime Epic: The Sequel That Never Was! Let's Go 2. Downtown

David Bowie doesn't do small. Big plans, big gestures, big everything. So, when he decided to work with Brian Eno again and cut an arty album inspired by his 'Berlin trilogy' in 1994 (after a return to ambinet textures in his excellent The Buddha Of Suburbia quasi-soundtrack album), he gathered musical partners from all kinds of eras, including Reeves Gabrels, Mick Garson and Erdal Kizilcay and got going. Encouraged by Eno's Oblique Techniques with signs giving instructions such as “Your are the last survivor of a catastrophic event and you will endeavour to play in such a way as to prevent feelings of loneliness developing within yourself”, Bowie and the band convened in Mountain Studios in Montreux and put hours and hours of material on tape.

Additional recordings to make the upcoming record more conventional saw Bowie add a couple of numbers to what was to become 1. Outside, the first in a proposed series of connected albums, detailling the story of private eye Nathan Adler and his investigations into an art-crime involving mutilation, cybernetics and what have you. The story itself was rudimentary and never made much sense, but it also was never the point in the slightest. As usual, Bowie used a concept as a launching pad, then cheerfully ignored questions of continuity or coherence. The essay included in 1. Outside probably explained the story better than the music did, and even then the whole thing was fragmentary at best. Bowie's original plan was to bring out the Leon/Outside material in yearly album installments, bringing him all the way up to the new millenium. Like we said: big plans, big gestures, big everything...

Alas. 1. Outside was the first episode of the on-going adventures of Nathan Adler in Oxford Town that unfortunately never were on-going and stopped after that very first episode. Admittedly, the whole an-album-a-year-plan was wishful thinking and never feasible, not in the classic distribution model of 1990s record companies. And Bowie of course never was in this thing for the long run, having been inspired by some of the 1995 material to dig deeper into jungle and drum'n'bass music, leading to 1997's Earthling, then zig-zagged to a relatively classic retro sound for 1999's hours. Forgotten in all this, or almost, were the further adventures of Nathan Adler, his suspects Leon Blank and Ramona A. Stone, and other unsavory characters populating Oxford Town. In 2002 Bowie returned to the Montreux material and started to prep it, hoping to turn it into a belated follow-up tentatively titled 2. Contamination.

As with so many other interesting projects, and especially from this time period (see: the unreleased Toy album), 2. Contamination never came to be, and the rest of the Montreux material stayed in whatever vault it was put. Then, after a 2003 leak of material called 'The Leon Tape' gave some fascinating insight into some of the wayward material and extremely odd nature of most of the Montreux sessions' music, something confirmed by the 2015 leak of The Leon Suites, three suites that were mixed as proof of concept for record companies when Bowie & Co. were looking in vain for a record deal for the original, almost entirely abstract project. Truthfully, it's no wonder that no record company wanted to touch what Bowie proposed without making substantial changes. The Leon Suites are completely uncompromising, extremely fragmentary and fragmented, often more talked than sung by Bowie in one of his often extremely theatrical character voices, with musical sections often only a minute or two long. But it also included a number of beautiful moments that deserved to be heard, preferrably in a slightly less abrasive setting. Which is where this alternative album comes in.

So, this isn't 2. Contamination, because no one knows what that woud have looked and sounded like. Technically, this album didn't even start as an 1. Outside-related project. The idea to do it came when I listened to hours b-sides “We Shall Go To Town” and “No One Calls”, a couple of cold, arty, angsty numbers that seem to have nothing in common with the rest of the nostalgic glow of hours, thus, the relegation to b-side status. They did, however, inevitably bring to mind the art-song atmosphere of 1. Outside. This got me thinking. What if Bowie doesnt bring these songs out as little-to-not-heard b-sides in 1999, but uses them to kickstart a sequel to 1. Outside, integrating them into some of the Montreux material to finally offer a follow-up to Nathan Adler's adventures?

2. Downtown is a follow-up/partner album to 1. Outside that has two goals: Continue, or at least expand, as well as possible, the story, while integrating some of the best unissued material from The Leon Suites, genuinely beautiful stuff like the track I titled “Chrome Foretold”, or “We'll Creep Together”. The middle of the first album side (so to speak) is designed as the arrest (“Round Up The Usual Suspect”) and interrogation of Leon (“Something Really Fishy”) who proclaims his innocence (via an alternative mix of “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town”, the only number also on 1. Outside), before turning its attention to suspect Ramona A. Stone and her vision of things.

The rest of the album further follows Adler down various rabbit holes, drops in on murderer/artist The Minotaur (“Into The Labyrinth”), then mirrors its predecessor by mimicking it: 1. Outside concluded its opressive, atonal and arty drama with a pure slice of pop, as Bowie somewhat inexplicably chose to re-record Buddha Of Suburbia's “Strangers When We Meet” as the closing number. 2. Downtown does a comparable gambit, using Bowie's 1. Outside b-side “Get Real” (a pop number certainly cut with the more conventional numbers in spring 1995 in New York) as its pop song closer, with Nathan Adler (possibly?) urging people to step out of cyberspace and 'get real'. But careful, the Minotaur is still lurking somewhere out there...

Listeners will also hear a familiar refrain, literally. I decided to use the ultra-catchy “Toll the bells, hail the private eye / All's well, the Twentieth Century dies” from “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town” as a leitmotiv throughout the album, incorporating it into a couple of numbers, as a kind of theme song for Nathan Adler going through his investigation.

So, 2. Downtown. This is, even if I focused on the bits that are more linear and melodic, still arty and not an easy “let it run in the background” kind of listen. It really demands your attention, while still being way more listenable than The Leon Suites. It also is proof for those who gave up on him during the mid-to-late 80s that he still had some of that arthouse juice that fueled the 'Berlin Trilogy' and Scary Monsters. (Also, if you haven't yet, check out my alt album version of Never Let Me Down which, if nothing else, beats the tar out of the released version.)

I'll let Nathan Adler take it from here...

Ciao, Bruce - Ti piace la musica Americana?!

It must've happened sometime in the middle of the 1980s. For almost two decades the Netherlands had been Europe's undisputed capital for everything country rock. And while the Dutch still love their line-dancing and their country music, another relatively unexpected country took their place as the place to be if you like country music and - as it came to be known in the 1990s - alt country or Americana. That place is Italy. Do you know what Italians also like? Bruce Springsteen! So, it seemed logical, for a small group of them, to combine their interests. And from that the idea of For You was born - Italian Americana artists covering Bruce Springsteen. Now here's a concept you don't see or hear everyday...

The most recognizable name of the line-up is...not what you'd expect. I - like a lot of people - discovered Alexi Lalas - at the Football (soccer to our American friends) World Cup 1994. He was instantly recognizable with his long red locks and beard. What I didn't know until very recently was that that appearance was enough to get him signed to a small first-league (Serie A) club in Italy and that he also was a budding musician in his spare time. And so, somehow, Lalas ended up on two tracks from the first For You compilation, both very good and present here. Other than that, the artists here are as much a mystery to me as they probably are for you. If they aren't, do tell me more about Francesco Lucarelli, The Blue Bonnets, Rossana Casale, Ricardo Maffone or the Modesta City Ramblers. These are presumably all low-key regional artists, but that doesn't mean that the job they're doing of bringing the Boss' music to life isn't a good one. 

                         Not the F.B.I. (full-blooded Italian) you were expecting, huh?!

There were two volumes of For You - the original compilation from 1995 and a belated follow-up in 2010. I picked more or less pasimonously from both volumes to make a sort of 'best of' For You, specifically picking the artists that covered some of Springsteen's lesser known songs. For one, because songs that aren't done to death are more interesting - and secondly, because the songs covering the old warhorses often sounded like well-meaning karaoke. Admittedly, I played it safe by opening with The Wild Junkers' cover of "Better Days" which...does sound a little bit like well-meaning karaoke. But the good kind! And from there, things do get a little more adventurous. Deep cuts like "Jesus Was An Only Child", "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Iceman" and "The Angel" make their apparition, often in interesting, arrangements that tweak things in an Americana direction, though not so much as to denature the originals entirely. On these twenty selections here, the artists find the sweet spot between paying homage and doing their own thing. 

So, here it is for you: Italian artists conering that most quintessentially American of songwriters. Some of these work better than others, but all of them deserve the benefit of doubt and a fair listen. So, here they are, For You...

Peter Fonda's hired hand and The Hired Hand

If you have never seen Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, you should probably rectify that omission. It is a fabulous and unique movie, part of the wave of revisionist Westerns that the New Hollywood brought with them, and yet it's own thing entirely apart. It was directed by one of the spearheads of the New Hollywood, coming freshly off Easy Rider, with a blank cheque for his directing debut, yet it has no signs of hipness or appealing easily to the counter culture the way Rider did. Of course it was a disaster to market, bombed and got taken out of cinemas almost immediately. Its failure alienated Peter Fonda from the Hollywood industry for years. It is a Western unlike any other. 

Part of its otherness, even within the genre, is the screenplay by Scot author Alan Sharp. Here, men aren't stoic and stay cool in every situation, the stereotype of the Westerner. When men die here, they wince and are afraid, they cry for their mother, or for a friend. "Hold me, Arch." Women aren't just there to support the men of action around them, they are their own boss. The decide what they do with their lives, with their bodies. When Peter's sister Jane watched the film, she told him that he'd made a feminist film. She isn't entirely wrong. 

Another part of its otherness is the outstanding work by DP Vilmos Zsigmond and editor Frank Mazzola. Especially in the first half of the movie - more impressionistic and less plot/dialogue-heavy - they create a Western unlike any other. Zsigmond's outstanding filmography - often only using natural light - was amplified by Mazzola's editing, with freeze frames and impositions, to create painterly tableaus that you haven't seen like this. Fonda wanted to make a film about the elements, and it shows, even if he had to be convinced at first to keep the stunning sequencees Mazzola created out of Zsigmond's fantastic images.  

And the last part of the otherness is Bruce Langhorne's music score, for which he played dozens of instruments, including unexpected ones like Sitar or flute. A true one man band. A review described his music as "both earthy and ethereal", which is right on the money. The earthy part are the choice of instruments, inspired by what instruments really were played at the time. The ethereal part is the music itself, which is extrememy beautiful, but also ghostly and otherworldly at times, perfectly supporting the slightly off-kilter atmosphere of The Hired Hand, especially in genre terms. 

It's maybe fitting that Bruce Langhorne himself is somewhat of a hired hand - a studio musician who would lend his acoustic fingerpicking skills to many a folk artist from the 1960s, most prominently Bob Dylan. It is by established by the man himself that the title character of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is Langhorne himself. The Bobster himself said "'Mr. Tambourine Man,' I think, was inspired by Bruce Langhorne. Bruce was playing guitar with me on a bunch of the early records. On one session, (producer)Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. It was as big as a wagon-wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind. He was one of those characters...he was like that. I don't know if I've ever told him that."  Like the inscrutable title character of Dylan's tale, Langhorne jingle-jangled, and played, and continued playing, never drawing much attention to himself. A true hired hand. He never made a solo record until 2011, an album that never came out on a label. It was called Mr. Tambourine Man and featured Langhorne and his big-ass tambourine the size of a wagon wheel. 

The Hired Hand, the movie is a total mood piece, and so is The Hired Hand, the music score. In keeping with that I worked the score into a single long piece, a sort of mixtape that keeps all the magical parts of Langhorne's score, mostly in chronological order, and eliminates a couple of minutes of more incidental music.The original score wasn't very long to begin with, around 25 minutes, and you'll get a little more than 17 minutes of that here. Just the best for the readers of One Buck Records, same as it ever was. 

                                  Now that is a grown man's tambourine right there...

Let Langhorne whisk you away for a magical quarter of an hour, then go and find out how you can see The Hired Hand. You will regret neither. 

Ellos Cantaron Juntos...Un Poco...O Mucho

Old time (ha!) One Buck records readers will know that I consider Crazy Eyes, reworked in December here to include the album's outtakes, their strongest album. But when I have to pick second favorites, I'll end up with an album, that probably no other Poconut would vote in that position. Yep, you guessed it, it's Cantamos (usually in a close match/almost tie with direct follow-up Head Over Heels, also an excellent, consistently strong album). 

Cantamos is a weird album in the Poco discography. It is, in many ways, their lost album, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. For decades, Cantamos wasn't available on CD, and when it finally became available in 2003 in the U.S. and 2006 in the U.K., the discs were soon very expensive, then sold out in short time anyway, putting the album out of print once more. And out of print (so to speak) it stayed. On their official You Tube channel they feature every single Poco album, across numerous labels, except Cantamos, which is nowhere to be found. Truly odd. And a little sad, as Cantamos is one of their very best and deserved a much better fate and wider audience. 

So, what makes the album great? First off, it has the first really good Rusty Young compositions. Young had the occasional instrumental (or semi-instrumental on predecessor Seven) on earlier albums, but here he really comes into his own as a writer on the excellent "Sagebrush Serenade" and "High and Dry", the latter staying a concert favorite for years (plus the more wussy "All The Ways" that presages his later penchant for soft rock). Paul Cotton, often responsible for some of the worst or more boring songs, brings out one of his best, "Western Waterloo", the lovely "Susannah" and the very good rocker "One Horse Blue". "Another Time Around" runs maybe a little long, as some of his songs from the era do, but has a memorble chorus. Timothy Schmit, never the most prolific of writers, has two songs, both winners. This is all top notch stuff. Poco thankfully also abandoned their experiments with harder edged rock they tried out on Seven, to mixed results and success.   

Seriously, how the hell do you have the above commissioned artwork and end up with this shit?

Cantamos is a mighty fine album, but it could still use some help. For one thing: better cover art. The original cover sleeve is just terrible. A small painting of Poco in the middle (actually, slightly left of center for some reason) of an especially and spectacularly ugly-looking pattern, that is probably supposed to represent some Southwestern U.S. Native American art, but could just as well be your parents' ugly-ass 'exotic' wallpaper from the 1970s. I sort of get what they were going for, hinting at the album's return to a true country sound, but man is the end result eye-searing. Looking for related Poco art I found the original cover illustration by Phil Hartmann, which seemingly was made for the innersleeve, though my dad's LP, from which I sourced a slightly crackly version of the album for years, definitely didn't have that. The original image is definitely a big improvement, if you can groove to the handpainted covers of the era (...and why wouldn't you?). It's also a fine - even metatextual - representation of the album's contents: Four pickers singing and playing together in the back room of an empty saloon. Sounds about right, considering Poco still not having a mass audience in 1974, sadly. Why this illustration was covered up with all that ugly stuff on the released version in the first place? Another mystery.  

I also thought that the sequencing of Cantamos could be improved, mainly because it always was odd to start with "Sagebrush Serenade". Good as the number is, it clearly shows how author Young is coming from writing instrumentals, having these long instrumental interludes. Good stuff, but maybe not ideal as an opening number. So to kick things off in style I opted for a one-two punch: Cotton's tough Old West epic "Western Waterloo", followed by one of Timothy B. Schmit's best (and criminally underrated) pop songs, "Whatever Happened To Your Smile", originally hidden away as the penultimate number "Sagebrush Serenade" gets to be the side closer it works much better as. The first two songs on side two are identical to the released version, and then I switched the rest around to balance Schmit and Cotton vocals. Speaking of: This is another reason for why Cantamos is so good: Young might write songs now, but the lead vocals still go to Schmit who is four or five times the vocalist Young is, even if they both work in the same vocal register. And Cotton sings in a nice, relaxed form. It always bothered me when on his first albums with Poco he would do this oddly pressed, nasal whine; basically going for a weird Neil Young impression. None of that stuff here, thank you very much. 

Yeah, so Cantamos is one of Poco's best, albeit little known work. This post will hopefully help a little to change that. And now that this blog post has grown longer than I thought it would, tiempo de escucharlos. Ellos cantaron...