Groove Into The New Year Like Sexy Muthafuckas...

Alright, long-standing One Buck Heads might remember that I drafted in Prince and a very special guest star (cough*MilesDavis* cough) in 2023 to groove you guys into the new year, last year I called on the original Boston Bad Boys - the J.Geils Band - to get the party going and now we're back to Prince Rogers Nelson to head the Saint Sylvester's Eve party. We are of course more than 25 years removed from that Prince feat. Miles concert, and Prince's heyday. Then again, this isn't a New Year's bash, but a normal concert from the Motor City in 2014, where Prince is backed by his all-female group 3rd Eye Girl. This is one of the cleanest sounding sound boards you'll ever hear, to the point where you can only hear the crowd faintly in the background 

The person preparing this bootleg went to the trouble of breaking every single song into its own track, even if it's just a couple of seconds of a song, sometimes only a single line that Prince incorporated into a medley. As with the Miles concert, I left this as is, only tagging the tracks correctly and adding the cover art. One track ("Sign O'The Times") is missing from the track list, probably because I got this from the Big O website years ago, and they would notoriously have a couple of links not working, and not bother to reset them corrcctly. Any way, with such a cornucopia of funky goodness from His Princeness you won't miss it. 

Notable tracks on here include tributes to Sly & The Family Stone (totally expected) and his supposd to be bitter rival Michael Jackson (less expected), as well as Wild Cherry's one hit wonder "Play That Funky Music". I personally am a little miffed that one of my favorites of his ("The Most Beautiful Girl In The World") is done with after a single line, but as the man says right after 'how many hits I got?' before launching into the next one. Either way, there's a ton of funky goodness in here. Prince also retakes "Nothing Compares To U" and of course wheels out warhorses like "Purple Rain", "When Doves Cry" or "Kiss".

Prince's power might have been diminishing in the latter part of his career, but this is still a lot of fun. 3rd Eye was a sympathetic backing band to the man, and he felt rejuvenated after spending the first decade of the new millenium flaling around quite a bit. Here he is back to the kind of futuristic funk that made his reputation in the first plae. So, get the party started with Prince and 3rd Eye Girl...

I Owe You An Explanation!

Indeed I do, since I started the Secret Santa's mystery song thing, and two and a half are possibly waiting for the solution. And I admit it upfront, the game was kind of rigged. It was almost impossible for you to find song and artist in question, unless you were really motivated, fired up Audacity and sped that sucker up, cranked to eleven). Either way, I hope you enjoyed the little (ahem) piece of music either way. The friends we made along the way etc. 

So this super secret surprise song came about like Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin - a total accident. I was working on my Fully Automated Version of Trans, mucking around with "Hold On To Your Love" on Audacity, trying out different filters and effects to make the song more, uh, Trans-ier. Results proved inconclusive to unsatisfying. Just before giving up I clicked on something called 'Paulstretch' - as Marc Cohn put it once in one of his great song intros 'life is pressing a button you never pressed before' - and immeditaley went 'uh oh', when the program announced it needed about 25 minutes to finish the task (though it probably ended up finishing earlier). Being in a 'let's see what it does when it wakes up' kind of mood, I wandered off, probably for something glamorous like loading the dishwasher, and color me surprised when I came back to my PC and Paulstretch had really stretched things. "Hold On To Your Love" went from going about three and a half minutes or so to lasting more than thirty! 

Yes, the ambient piece hiding in the Secret Santa's Mystery Box is nothing other than an extremely slowed down  - er, I mean paulstretched - version of Neil Young's "Hold On To Your Love". Well at least now I know how folks on Youtube create 'ambient' or 'meditation' versions of songs - a simple press of a button will do. Lazy bastards, the dirty lot of ya! Interesting though, how in one touch you can bring out your inner Vangelis...

As a prize for everyone playing along you'll get Johnny's Island, the kinda-sorta (mini) album Young recorded in Hawaii with a band dubbed - with usual Young-ish style - The Royal Pineapples, from which "Hold On To Your Love" originated, before it got mashed up with the Trans material. The sorta title song "Johnny" is the only one not with the band, a DIY home recording with Neil on synclavier and synthesizers, still somewhat in Trans mode before sliding into a mellower mood for the Island material. Includes the original version of "Silver & Gold". 

It's A Holiday Hootenanny, y'all, with the newest edition of them Bluegrass Chartbusters...

Some of your family members still around for their annual visit for the holidays? Any of 'em from Hicksville, Somewhere? (Let's not investigate blood relations here, shall we?) They all ready to prolong the festivities with a good ol' fashioned bluegrass hoedown hootenanny? 

Or do you have very refined urban hipster guests who still have a hard time finding the door? Who just might recoil in horror at the sound of a banjo, thinking someone might soon invite them to squeal like a pig? Well, turn up this hick music to send them running towards their microbreweries and organic soy drink shops!

You see, Bluegrass Chartbusters is the right series for any occasion involving your Christmas guests! 

Beware Of Cats!

This series just keeps chugging along, providing once more 20 perfectly lovely or interesting Bluegrass versions of rock and pop classics from yesteryear. Nothing much has changed, we're looking at a line-up that includes Pickin On... stalwarts Cornbread Red, Iron Horse, The Sidekicks and Brad Davis, as well as more recent additions Town Mountain and The Grass Cats (check out those cats above...), the latter with frankly fantastic renditions of, respectively, "I"m On Fire" and "I Shot The Sheriff".

A new arrival to the series is Hit & Run Bluegrass, a group led by Rebecca Frazier, and in this case produced by her husband John. It's second guitar player Mike Mickelson doing the lead vocals on their take on "Jessie's Girl", but Hit & Run Bluegrass will assuredly be back on future volumes. The same thing is true of fellow newcomers to this series, Craig Ferguson & Band, who cover Foo Fighters' "Times Like These (One Way Motorway)", also covered by Glen Campbell back on his modern standards album Meet Glen Campbell. 

No, OBG, no! Refrain yourself! No 'Hit & Run' jokes here, no, sir!!!

If on the last volume we could almost lament a short supply of Cornbread Red, but here you can feast on them doing Barenaked Ladies' "One Week", Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and Def Leppard's "Let's Get Rocked". Family band The Petersens are also back, here with a rare lead vocal performance of family friend and dobro master Emmet Franz on a slowed-down version of the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way", as well as a sibling duet on Coldplay's "The Scientist". 

Songs covered run a large spectrum, from Brad Davis' take on 1968's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" to 2014's "Shake It Off" by the one and only Taylor Swift of course. Along the way we check in with versions of "Walk Like An Egyptian", Nirvana's "Come As You Are" and, perhaps most surprisinly, Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train", the latter two taken care of by old pros Iron Horse. I also particularly like instrumental closer "No Surprises", an instantly recognizable version of the Radiohead classic by Old School Freight Train. 

The Christmas Hootenanny is on with these twenty fun and occasionally innovative covers of beloved favorites from almost fifty years of popular music. Yeehaw and Ho-Ho-Ho!

Have You Been Naughty Or Nice? Hmmm? The One Buck Guy Is Both Naughtier And Nicer...

Ho! Ho! Ho! And by that I do mean the scantily clad women hanging around in a photogenic manner in this thread's various visual supports. It's Christmas time again, folks, and here at One Buck Records that can only mean two things: women in various state of Holiday-themed skimpy outfits and a specially compiled Christmas compilation for my very favorite readers - which is all of you, obviously. 

You might have noticed on the last two volumes (which are also re-upped, gotta keep that Christmas music comin'....) that I keep the irreverent and snotty limited. Yes, these Christmas collections are supposed to be fun and not entirely traditional, but big ol' sentimental me also enjoys a genuine take on a Christmas carol by a favorite artist, so there's also quite a bit of those from perennial OBG faves like Tift Merrit, Tracy Chapman and Shawn Colvin. This doesn't stop me, obviously, from opening proceedings with Cheap Trick kickin' down Santa's door with "Come On Christmas". Power pop fans will be served on this volume, as we also have Christmas Carols from the likes of Chris Stamey, Del Lords and Fountains Of Wayne, while genre-adjacent Marshall Crenshaw's DIY contribution is a little more subdued (dig the 80s Casio groove, friends..).

Oh, hello there, lady...is there something for me in there..?

And then there's the ones that split the difference between the genuine and...the genuinely weird. Hear Nat King Cole fight his way through a phonetic cheat sheet while wrestling the original German language version of "O Tannenbaum" to a draw! Witness the improbable once-in-a-lifetime dream team of David Bowie and Bing Crosby (or, as Bowie recalls him at his advanced senior age, looking like 'an orange sitting on a stool') with the improbably beautiful "Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy". These are unironically two of my favorite Christmas tunes! I'll leave it to the listener to judge whether the group vocals during the second half of Chris Stamey's "Christmas Song" are genuine and charming or willingly amateur and a send up. If you do want lovely group vocals, don't go further than The Wondermints doing their loveliest Beach Boys impression on "Santa's Beard"!

We also have slightly jazzy takes from the likes of Ray Charles and Don Dixon! Further vets like Jose Féliciano and John Hiatt! Wisenheimers like Nick Lowe and Sufjan Stevens! Truly a cornucopia of Holiday tunages, accompanied, as ever, by the One Buck Records Elvettes coming up right underneath..

So, have yourself a merry little Christmas, everybody...

P.S.: While uploading this comp I've just learned that Chris Rea died this week. Not a huge fan, but considering tha radio proclivities of my parents, I couldn't escape the man. Here's his Christmas classic "Driving Home For Christmas"

R.I.P. Christopher Anton Rea, 1951-2025

 

Breezy Beach Christmas Cheer...

 

 

Out of the corner of my eye I've seen a couple of you rummaging in the original Bambu thread, alas without the music. So as an addendum to the underrated singer-songwriter back pages thread, and an early Christmas present for some of you, here's Dennis' beautiful Bambu again...

Oaxaca: When The Blue Öyster Cult Became The Grateful Dead...For A Psychedelic Minute...Or Two

Some rock bands are born fully formed, but most aren't. A ton of them flail around for a couple of years, in terms of finding their proper style, their finalized line-up, hell, ven their band name. Blue Öyster Cult did all this, cycling through band names, band members and decidedly different styles from the dumb-but-smart hard rock that defined the band from at least Secret Treaties (1973) onwards. Even the band's first two albums, the self-titled debut and Tyranny And Mutation, show the band still finding themselves, with the debut still closer to their roots as a psych-folk outfit, while Tyranny shows them making major strides towards their sugnature sound from Secret Treaties on. But for years the future Cult was searching for the right fit in sound and style, leaving some interesting artifacts behind. Hey, folks, anyone up for some acid rock from the future Blue Öyster Cult? 

First off, the name: Oaxaca was the band's name when they recorded these demos, so we'll stick with it - not to mention it sounds way more psychedelic than The Stalk-Forrest Group ('By the way, which one's Forrest?'), under which these demos were finally issued in 2001. Having started out as White Soft Underbelly, the band had recently lost original lead singer Les Braunstein, to be replaced internally by Eric Bloom - and recorded the songs on this album as Oaxaca, essentially rerecording these tracks, as a first recording was done with Braunstein. Oaxaca - still with Andrew Winters on bass instead of Joe Bouchard - then went into the Elektra studios in Los Angeles to lay down a ten track demo. This is that, plus the short track "John L. Sullivan" that is from around the same time, and was issued on the BÖC Rarities album, which itself quickly became a rarity, in an ironic twist the band would surely appreciate. 

Overall, this is a fascinating look at the Cult and the road not taken. A year later they remixed or re-recorded some of these a year later in New York to nudge them closer into their burgeoning hard rock direction, by that time the band had been the Stalk-Forrest Group for a while. These are the original recordings of the proto-Blue Öyster Cult, as a full-fledged, Grateful Dead-inspired acid rock/ psych rock band. If you go into another fascinating direction, go the whole way. 

Some of the Imaginos stuff is already rearing its head in this very early stage: "Curse Of The Hidden Mirrors" - the opening track here - later gave an otherwise unrelated BÖC album its name, and Albert Bouchard integrated it into its own take on the Imaginos myth, while "Gil Blanco Country" was left off the album in 1987, much to Bouchard's unhappiness, and he put it onto ReImaginos. There is also a very early version of "I'm On The Lamb".

Bloom's lead vocals on these tracks are much more subtle, and in many ways sweeter, than his showman growling on later Cult numbers. So we get the sweet psych folk-rock of the aforementioned "Gil Blanco Country" and during the opening of "St. Cecilia", which then turns into a Gateful Dead-type acid rock instrumental workout. You can almost guess the sound of later BÖC in the driving "Donovan's Monkey", on which Bloom approaches his later vocal stylings. "Arthur Comics" mixes acid/garage rock with blues licks, while "Bonomo's Turkish Raffy", which they dropped from the new demo/album configuration a year later is pure psych guitar pop. Very far from real BÖC, and all the better for it. 

Some of it sounds well of its time. "Raggamuffin Dumplin'" with lines like "I'm the magic man with the magic plan" for example, or the weirdness of "Quicksand", which unwisely was a year later chosen as a try-out single that unsurprisingly stiffed. And in some ways, while this is interesting mimicry, the future for these New York area-wise asses didn't lie in Southern Californian acid rock, even if they give it their all, as in fully psyched-out closer "A Fact About Sneakers". But this is not only interesting for historical purposes, ior as a piece of juvenilia from a band that would go on to be bigger and better, it's a genuinely good listen if you're into late 60s acid rock. Which I'm normally not, but I'm digging this, and so should fans of the genre. 

So, didn't think you'd ever hear Blue Öyster Cult dress up as The Grateful Dead and doing a good job of it? Then think again and hear what Oaxaca is all about...and dig it, maaaaaaaan!

My Back Pages #1 - Unknown & underrated singer-songwriters

 

A suggestion in the thread of Barbara Keith's album posted last weekend suggested a spotlight on underrated or too little known songwriters as a worthy endeavor. Well, I like to think that One Buck Records has already done its part in that department, either through the One Album Wonders series or some regular posts. And since I was thinking of doing something with the ever-growing back catalogue of this blog that may have passed a bunch of people by, I'll just launch what will be a semi-regular feature. My Back Pages will essentially a little reminder of what great music lies in the back pages of this blog, and I will just post a couple of links to the line-ups with renewed links for the albums in question.

Since the topic was underrated or unknown songwriters,

how about checking out Michael Johnson's fabulous debut album in a slightly reworked form? 

or take a trip further up north and

join Luke Gibson for another perfect day of perfect 70s stoner singer-songwriter stuff

You could also move to the mystic kingdom Of Fife

and listen intently to Jackie Leven's Songs Of The Forbidden West

or go and visit the two Bobs who are not that Bob, 

first Bob Burchill with another unknown country rock classic from the 70s

and then fellow canuck 

Bob Carpenter and his mostly unknown Americana classic Silent Passage

or, if you are in a somber winter mood, 

revisit the music of Jay Bolotin that should be much wider known

Now there. That should do it. I take it y'all have already the music I posted of the late, great Neal Casal for whom I will never not stan...

...and of course, be back this weekend for new music coming to One Buck Records...

Exit On Easy Street: Sayin' Goodbye To The Lord Of The Highway

Joe Ely died earlier this week. Now, unlike some other folks that have dies in recent years, I don't have a particularly strong connection to Ely, despite him working in Americana, so music that should be right up my alley. But somehow I never stumbled over any of his albums, so he mainly stayed in my conscience as a guy that many of the Americana and Alt Country artists that I like idolized and namechecked. As a matter of fact, for years the only Joe Ely song in my collection was the cover of "Are You Sure Hand Done It This Way?" with Uncle Tupelo. Ely had been sick for a while it seems, and announced in Spetember that he had dementia and Parkinson's, so you figured he wouldn't be very long for this world. Still, another one of the old heroes gone. It's starting to get mighty thin in the ranks for a certain type of country-folk singer-songwriter. Having recently posted the second album of my Willie & Waylon Outlaws series, I'm thinking that Willie Nelson is immortal, but he will definitely be the last one left.

Anyway, just because I'm not the world's biggest Ely fan, mainly out of ignorance, doesn't mean that I won't mark his passing with a bit of his music. Because the only Ely music I have I put aside a while ago to maybe do something with for this blog. And now that Ely is gone, I did. So these tracks that make up Easy Street and a second album to come up later were recorded by Joe Ely in the mid-80s, in 1985 or early 1986 to be precise, for a follow-up to 1984's Hi-Res. However, his relationship with RCA, the label he was with for eight years and five albums was starting to get rocky, and MCA decided against releasing an album from these sessions, finally dropping Ely from the label. He recorded two albums for Hightone Records before fianlly going back top MCA for the 90s. 

The music that is on Easy Street is proof of Ely's all-encompassing approach to his music. It's rooted in country, but Ely's music is as much rock, while also dipping into honky tonk, mariachi music, and even reggae, as on "Up A Tree", while kick-ass opener "Baby Needs A New Pair Of Shoes" is almost new wave. He's also pretty good with country ballads, as on "A Thousand Miles From Home" and "Heart And Soul". This is all pretty good stuff, and eminently worth of being released. Fair warning, though; This is music from the mid-80s and boy does it sound like it. Drums like gunshots, an overly bright and very likely digital sheen - this isn't a roots record in the traditional sense, or at least it doesn't sound like one. But it does sound pretty good, even if it does sound of its time. 

So here's part one of unreleased Joe Ely, which we more or less discover together. Next stop: Easy Street...

R.I.P. Earle Rewell "Joe" Ely, 1947 - 2025

Someone's Secret Santa Surprise...

 

Now here's something unusual, even for this blog. Find a mystery track in the box of Secret Santa. It's a track by a well-known artist, though it has been reworked from it's original form.

Can you guess who hides behind this super-secret-mystery present? 

Edit - Hint 1 

The artist in question has been featured here on the blog, both directly and indirectly, and while s/he is known to be eclectic, s/he is not known for ambient pieces...

Edit - Hint 2

The song is generally considered not to be a great fit for the album it's on, which is an album that was recently discussed on these pages. The artist in question, known for unorthodox song inclusions, probably couldn't care less. 

The Vanishing: How Barbara Keith Dropped A Classic Album And Then Simply...Dropped Out

Time to check back in with one of the venerated perfomers on our beloved All Pearls No Swine series. Barbara Keith wasn't as obscure a name as some of the others featured on the very first APNs, but she made herself obscure by simply vanishing at the tie he brought out the album that could and should have been her big breakthrough. Keith had played the folk clubs of Greenwich village, before playing with the folk-rock combo Kangaroo, led by future Orleans-leader John Hall, who published an album in 1968. She then recorded her self-titled debut for Verve Forecast, which had some decent numbers on it, though nothing exceptionally striking. Allmusic's Richie Unterberger is right, when he says that it is " respectable, slightly above-average singer/songwriter musicn with a strong country-rock flacor", the latter of which of course pleasing the One Buck Guy. 

But the real stunner came, when three years later she recorded and released another self-titled album, this time on Reprise. As one would imagine from a Warner Brothers/Reprise recording, the cream of players showed up to help out, including Lowell George (whose slide elevates Keith's classic "Detroit Or Buffalo"), Lee Sklar, as well as Spooner Oldham and Stinky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel. 

"All Along The Watchtower" is a truly intriguing take on Dylan's classic, including some electronic effects that imitate the growling cat. The paranoid, apocalyptic atmosphere of the song really comes through and if Keith's version has a minor fault, it's that it fades out too quickly, just as the electric guitars start to get going. "The Bramble And The Rose" is a superior ballad,as is "Rainy Nights Are All The Same", and I've already talked about what a great song "Detroit Or Buffalo" is, as it was done by both One Buck Records-featured Bruce Stephens and Neal Casal. The gospel-inspired "Burn The Midnight Oil No More" or the anthemic "Free The People", almost immediately covered by Delaney & Bonnie - Barabar Keith is taking the 'all killer, no filler' concept to heart here.

Despite the quality of the album - ten tracks, some classics, none less than very good - there was one major critic of the album - Barbara Keith herself. "It didn't feel like me yet, and so we gave back the album advance money and quit". Keith had just married Keith Tibbles, the songwriting partner of the album's producer Larry Marks, and - with the album somehow not matching the sound she imagined for herself, Keith up and went and quit the music business entirely, to start a family with Tibbles. With Keith dropping out, Reprise did little to no promotion for the album and it was almost immediately withdrawn, only adding to the album's myth. For years and years there were no signs of Keith, then 25 years later she resurfaced with the family band The Stone Coyotes, consisting of Tibbles and her stepson, as a local attraction in the Springfield, Massachussets area. But that's another story. 

Now, I don't know what could have probably been Keith's problem with the album, as everything here is top-notch: Keith's songwriting, with only the Dylan number coming from the outside, the production, the playing. This is nothing less than fantastic. Then again, so was The La's' only album (the curse of the self-titled albums?), and Lee Mavers couldn't hear it, and also dropped out. Whaddayaknow, right?! Either way, listen to this, and tell me I'm wrong. 

In addition to the classic 1972 eponymous (there! I said it!) album you'll get a whooping twelve bonus tracks, eleven tracks from the debut album and its singles, as well as a modern remix of "All Along The Watchtower". I didn't include the two Kangaroo tracks, as their acid rock fuzz guitar intermezzos, even within Keith's folk-rockn don't really match with the rest of the music here, though fans of that type of music can probably worse than checking it out. But befor these extracurricular studies, check out Barbara Keith and wonder with me how she could possibly quit the music business with that album in the bag. 

The More All Pearls No Swine Change...

 ...the more they stay the same, obviously. Taking a second visit into the 90s yields one of those APNS volumes that is low on truly rare and/or odd stuff. Then again, in the golden age of the CD, a concept like private press records could not be more out of style. Instead All Pearls No Swine Vol. 34 presents a bunch of underappreciated and too little known recordings, with the occasional indie weirdo thrown in. 

With the 90s really being the birthplace of Alt Country/No Depression, this volume has a number of entries in that particular subgenre, starting with the kicking-ass-est of kicking ass openers, Uncle Tupelo's "Gun". Of all of their heavier, punk-inspired songs this is by far my favorite, with a chorus I will always sing/shout along with: "Just don't tell me which way I oughta run / or what good I could do anyone / 'cause my heart it was a gun / it's unloaded now, so don't bother". From there we dip right into 90's slow-core with Red House Painters' amazing cover of Kiss' "Shock Me", then check in with a pop/new wave hero (and ex-punk-ish) Midge Ure with the anthemic "I See Hope In The Morning Light" from 1991's Pure, which I fished out of a bargain bin for a buck (where'd ya think my name came from?) without particularly high expectations, but which really is an underappreciated, extremely well done pop album, that just had the misfortune to come out when that kind of music was just starting to feel a bit passé, what with grunge and alternative rock starting to push the old-fashioned pop establishment towards the door. 

Speaking of the establishment: There's a ton ofrejuvenated  veterans showing up on this volume: After his, uh, not unanimously loved comeback as a hair metal hero in the late 8s, the early 90s was a bit of a more low-key time for Mr. Vincent Furnier, which means that a great little song like "Lost In America" might have slipped through the cracks, in which he hilariously talks of the trials and tribulations of a disaffected young guy. The lyrics are too long to quote, but I love his deadpan delivery towards the end, when he reiterates that he's looking for a girl with a gun and a job, then adds "and a house...with cable". Tom Petty shows up with the home recorded demo of "Wildflowers", while the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band deliver one of their best tunes of this relative down period wth "Angel". Other Americna vets in play: The Flying Burrito Bros. Mark 112 or so covering Son Volt's classic "Windfall", while ex-Byrd John York shows up again with the lovely "Whose Door".

A loose Americana affiliation can also be given to the two rarities: Tom Kell's "The Gun", and Ed & Pat Gibson's "Ode To Billie-Joe Tucker", both awesome. Enough has been said on these pages on the greatness of Neal Casal, checking in with "Day In The Sun" from his classic debut album, while Gillian Welch's & David Rawlings' fabulous"Birds Of A Feather" was demoed, but didn't make it onto the former's debut album. Which is a shame because it's country harmonising heaven, as one would expect, and livelier than a lot of stuff that made it onto Revival. And finally there's Alt Country mainstays The Jayhawks, here in it's Mark Olson-lesslater iteration, with the excellent "The Man Who Loved Life" from the underrated Sound Of Lies.

It's not all Americana or Alt Country, though: Great popmoments from Icehouse, Jackie Leven and the ever-reliable Aztec Camera. A pop classic of another kind is "Velvet", made famous by A-Ha, but here in its original form by Pal Waaktaar's band Savoy (named after his wife and co-vocalist, ahhhh, cute). Waaktaar always dreamed of making moody guitar-based rock, and arguably did it as well as possible on this track. Blur team up with their French heroine Françoise Hardy (immortalized with a fab comp on these pages) and the Bhundu Boys take us away into the orient, and out of All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 34, with their "Foolish Harp".

An eclectic program with ton of good stuff to discover. Same as it ever was. 

There's Bob Dylan's (Hired) Guns Across The River, Tryin' To Pound You...

The Billy The Kid Sessions outtakes have been around for the better part of forever, but they always were a frustrating listen: Reflecting the shambolic nature of the sessions itself, there's tons of false starts, both musically and vocally, as well as talking to the engineers in the sound booth, people laughing and caughing through the music, and lots and lots of dead space. I compiled a version of these many years ago, notably before I discovered Audacity, and it remained a frustrating listen, despite the many fun, even slightly revelatory moments coming from the sessions, as it was hard to - you know - concentrate on the music in the middle of all the detritus. So, finally I got down to do something about it: The music of Dylan's Billy The Kid Sessions, and only the music. No bullshit. No talking until strictly necessary. No time wasted. Music, all I hear is music..

As said above, the sessions from whence this music came were aything but sharp or concentrated. Dylan - already in a wtriting drought forthe better part of two years - had ambled down to Mexico to also play in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garret & Billy The Kid, in a performance that didn't make him out to be a future star of the silver  screen. His mostly silent role as henchman Alias is mostly (in)famous for Dylan's big scene being the one in which his character reads labels of canned food. Somebody get that man an Academy Award! Asap! Tasked with producing a soundtrack, there was a whole lot of aimless jamming, a few unsuccesful stabs at songs such as "Goodbye Holly", "Sweet Amarillo" (later sung on Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour in a more finished form by Cindy Bullens) or "Rock Me Mama" (outfitted with new lyrics and finished by Old Crow Medicine Show in 2003). 

The soundtrack that finally emerged from these sessions was decidedly a minor work that showed Dylan's somewhat mitigated concentration, as well as his continued inability to come up with tunes. He only completed two real songs - the classic "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" and "Billy", a ballad about the title character present in three different versions, arguably to take up space on the album. The rest were instrumental score pieces, even though, well, if you hire Dylan, you don't really hire him for a score. Here's the leading lyricist of his generation, stayiong relatively speechless, not to mention that his compositions are missing the dynamic of a trained score composer. So Dylan's Pat Garret & Billy The Kid wasn't a particularly satisfying listen, but the whole thing was treated as a minor side project anyway, with Dylan rebounding with Planet Waves six months later. 

All of these factors make the music on the Billy The Kid Sessions both fascinating and frustrating. You wonder what would have happened to the aforementioned song fragments and abandoned songs had Dylan concentrated on finishing them. There are a ton of moments - some admittedly fleeting - in this bootleg, where the music perks up and risks to become more interesting than what ended up on the album,  but just as often suddenly ends, as the music sputters out or some other incident stops the take. This stop-and-go pattern was undoubtedly one of the biggest frustration with listening to this set, and so the idea to streamline the music was born. Historical the bootleg might be, where you hear Dylan mucking around in the studio, but it was simply an awful way to listen to the music. 

Now that only the music was left, I was still left with a dilemma of sorts: Does all of this stuff deserve to be heard? How much wordless (and, let's be fair here, sometimes tune-less) vocalizing from the Bobster is too much? Is the often repetitive nature of the tunes endearing or annoying? I am genuinely of two minds about what's better: a slightly repetitive 55 minute version that gathers pretty much all of the worthwhile music from the sessions, or a more streamlined, 'could have come out on vinyl' 46 minute edition. So, I'll do something Solomon-ian that's a first for this here blog: I'll leave you the choice.

If you are a semi-casual listener (because let's face it, if you are here and intersted in outtakes from an obscure Bob Dylan soundtrack, you might not  be a casual listener) the vinyl version of this should suffice nicely, if you want to dig even deeper inton the scraps, you can go for the CD edition. The biggest differences in the set list are the loss of several "Billy" variations, including "Funky Billy" - the third version of "Billy" on this album, where they try out the song with a markedly funkier guitar riff, that was both interesting as well as slightly incongruous -  and a number of reprises in the shortened vinyl edition. 

No matter which edition you choose (choose your own adventure here at OBG's!), there's some fine music to be found in the midst of the murk, and I am happy to present you these moments in what I think is easily the best way to listen to this music. So take it away with Billy The Kid Sessions, and a still searching Dylan wandering the wilderness, down some interesting dusty backroads...

The Full Monty...ah...Whoops, No, I Mean The Full Donnie...

The problem with starting, like, half a dozen or so loose series of themed albums is that it's easy to forget them and then, only a couple of months later say, 'oh, I wanted to post a follow-up to that'. When I posted my rejiggered version of the Dick Tracy soundtrack back in *checks archives* July I promised a series of reworked (and thus hopefully)improved soundtracks, then promptly forgot about posting a second album for a cool six months. But here it is, and it is a doozy, folks. A great score and some, uh, interesting pop music cobined to give you the whole Donnie Darko experience. 

Speaking of interesting. That is probably the word that comes easily to mind when thinking about Richard Kelly's debut film. Weird, fascinating, overwrought, (over)ambitious - lots of other adjectives come to mind. Truth is, though, when that movie came out in 2001, there was nothing like it. People will of course remember the dark, winding, weird and finally relatively impenetrale story of doomed teen Donnie Darko's adventures including a pedophile self-help guru, a scary-ass 6-foot+ rabbit (well, a scary-ass six foot+ dude in a rabbit suit), wanton destruction and arson, a plane crash, time travel and, uh, the end of the world. Donnie Darko came out as part of a series of mindfuck films around the millenium, none of course bigger or mindfuck-ier than Fight Club. Where is my mind? 

Now, it's been a good long while since I last saw Donnie Darko - at least twenty years ago. And I wonder whether it'll hold up, as so many of his mindfuck movie brethren fail to, once you know their story secrets. But I suspect it might, even if the crazy-ass story becomes less important than the look and feel of the film. Donnie Darko had a number of intriguing surface features: the moody cinematography courtesy of veteran Steven Poster, the acting by a young Jake Gyllenhaal in the title role, joined by produceer Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze playing against type. And it has a distinctive setting - the fall of 1988; with Michael Dukakis' disastrous bid to beat Bush the Elder being the background for the film's crazier adventures. And sometimes these surface features make all the difference. That's why a film like The Sixth Sense still holds up even if you know the twist - it's just so well designed and shot - back when Shyamalan wasn't synonymous with charlatan. Or why The Usual Suspects still works, even if you know who the hell Keyser Soze is - the fun-as-hell actors and surehanded direction make the film worh a revisit either way. 

But maybe the most stunning was the use of music: Michael Andrews' beautiful, or suspenseful (mostly) piano miniatures alternating with a number of 80s pop and alternative rock? I remember how the film immediately hooked me when Echo And The Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon" played over the opening of Donnie riding his bike. Both the score and the soundtrack album got released, but they missed out on what made the music of the movie special: It was the mix of Andrews' score intermingled with these 80s tunes. So this OBG-reworked soundtrack of Donnie Darko tries to do right by this intoxicating mix of the classical and the classics from yesteryear by mixing them up in the chronological order in which they appeared in the film (with one major excdption). As such, you get a sort of mind's eye version of the film, spurred on by the music, with most of it being simply fabulous. Maybe not, you know, Duran Duran's "Notorious", but it was part of Donnie Darko and is largely compensated for by the presence of The Church, Joy Division and 'Til Tuesday.

So, here you get the music the way it was in the movie, and the way it was supposed to be heard: Andrews' sometimes unsettling, sometimes sweepingly beautiful score rubbing shoulders with the 80s tunes that worked so well and felt so fresh in the early 2000s. Now, almost a quarter century later, too many films have gone to that well too many times, but back then Donnie Darko was one of the first - and best - to do it.  ow, about that big exception: The soundtrack of Donnie Darko actually spawned a hit single - the slowed down, elegiac version of Tears For Fears' "Mad World" as sung by Gary Jules. I seem to remember that a couple of weeks ago someone commenting over at Jokonky's called that version the biggest travesty or some such thing, but I couldn't disagree more. In Tears For Fears almost cheerful synth version the downbeat lyrics bounced off the beat in a rather incongruous way. In Michael Andrews' and Gary Jules' version the song sounds like its sentiments. Whether that makes it more or less attractive, I'll leave up to you. Not wanting to wait until the very end to listen to the song, I frontloaded it, then put the alternative version at its natural place towards the very end.

So, enjoy this improbable but intoxicating mix - as improbable and intoxicating as the film itself. One of these days I have to get back to revisit Donnie Darko, but in the meantime we can all revisit its splendid soundscapes...

PS. The Michel Gondry-directed video to "Mad World" is definitely worth a rewatch if you haven't seen it in 24 years...

This Just In: All Pearls, No Swine - Megapack 3 *updated link*

 

Well, well, well...now that we are in the Thirties of One Buck Records' flagship series, and recently a new visitor to these realms asked for a reup of the previous two, here's All Pearls, No Swine Megapack 3, including Volumes 21-30, in case anybody has missed these and wants to check these out. Which means that now, all thirty volumes of APNS are online and available. 

I thought of this because I forgot to set a link to the first adventures of Waylon & Willie in the review to the sequel, which is now set as well. So there. New music coming up soon, as usual. 

Edit: When posting this I was simultaneously setting the link for Waylon & Willie mentioned, and there was a snafu when copying & pasting links, as a visitor pointed out. This error has now been corrected and you will now find the correct link leading to APNS 21-30.

The Outlaws Ride Again...And This Time They Brought Some Friends...

Sequel time! My first compilation of Waylon & Willie, done years ago for my own personal listening pleasure, was an unexpected success, with a bunch of you appreciating some old school Outlaw country, vinyl crackles and all be damned. No such thing here for round two with our favorite outlaws, everything here has been digitally sourced. And, to make sure the Outlaw party keeps rockin', we have invited some ol' friends along for the ride. That includes original outlaws Tompall Glaser and of course Waylon's wife Jessi Coulter (who had a cameo appearance on The Outlaws Ride!). Both were originally featured on the 1976 Wanted: The Outlaws album, but I didn't carry their songs over to keep it strictly W & W on that first volume. Both get their due here, showing up with solo showcases. 

Another friend that can very loosely be lumped in with the Outlaws is Merle Haggard, whose take on a cowboy ballad with Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty" got him and Willie a charttopper in 1982. But the real joker in the pack is an outlaws who wasn't always, or even most of the time, country: why, it's Uncle Neil himself! Actually, the idea for this sequel sprang, surprisingly, not from listening to the W's, but from me immersing myself in some mid-80s Neil while working on the automated Trans and its live companion. While listening to the cheapo Geffen years compilation Mystery Train I stumbled onto "Bound For Glory", Neil's duet with Waylon Jennings from Old Ways, and I was struck by how much it sounds like a classic Outlaws duet from the 70s, except with Neil's voice in place of Willie's. Which in turn brought me to check into the possibility of letting those outlaws ride again. 

And ride again they do. In addition to the aforementioned tracks and artists, I collected the most outlaw-ish tracks from Waylon & Willie, starting with "Write Your Own Songs", Willie's skewering of conservative-minded record execs, sung as a duet with Waylon. Two other times do the W's sing together, including on Steve Earle's outlaw anthem "Nowhere Road". Obviously we can't go with some trademark Waylon outlaw anthems: "Ladies Love Outlaws", "Slow Movin' Outlaws", "I'm a Ramblin' Man", his version of a different type of outlaw classic, "Midnight Rider". and his theme song for The Dukes Of Hazzard which is of course the first Waylon Jennings I ever heard. My favorite just might be "Too Dumb For New York City" with the protagonist's realization that he likes the midwest best cause he is "too dumb for New York City and too ugly for L.A.".

Ol' Willie recalls the first volume with the original Waylon-less version of "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys" and a bluegrass take on "Good Hearteed Woman" that Willie rcorded at the sprightly age of 90, while otherwise showing his gift for balladry with songs like "So You Think You're A Cowboy" or "Hands Of Time". 

The Outlaws Ride Again! is, I'd say, as good a listen as The Outlaws Ride!, even if (or because?) it's taken from a much wider selection of albums. Tons of great Outlaw Country, just like you'n'me'n'everyone else  likes. So, let those outlaws ride once more, always remembering the old proverb. Where there's a Will(ie), there's a Way(lon).