R.I.P. Dwight Twilley
1951 - 2023
Didn't see this until yesterday. Feel like listening to some Twilley. Looked for "Twilley Don't Mind" but didn't seem to have it, so had to change that. Twilley always kept that power pop flag flying high. Let's listen to some Twilley then, Twilley don't mind you know...
Find below the two albums by the Dwight Twilley Band, first one with bonus tracks.
...and some high profile victims there are, notably Van Morrison, whose Astral Weeks didn't stand a chance against Lou Reed & company and Pink Floyd, the only high seed to lose in an upset, and lose decisively. And the number one seed (and overall top seed!) Pet Sounds fell behind early and had to claw its way out to live another day in the tightest decision of the bracket. A drink for Talking Heads who almost created the upset!
Not everyone voted for every album, but here are the scores:
Pet Sounds (1) - Remain In Light (8) 6:4
Velvet Underground And Nico (4) - Astral Weeks (5) 6:3
Dark Side Of The Moon (3) - Led Zeppelin IV (6) 2:5
Nevermind (2) – Thriller (7) 7:2
Stay tuned, folks, the next first round bracket in our Best Album Eliminator coming up soon...
Phew. It's hard work to do theme work on time, however useless it may be. Halloween's gone, All Hallows has come and gone as well. In Spanish-speaking countries, it is of course dia de muertos, the day of the dead. And...wouldn't you know it...that does ring a bell...don't I have just the thing to go with that, even if it is a day or two later.
An interesting trend in the music market of the last years was the way artists and record companies were going gargantuan with their music offerings. Generally speaking of course, not many folks buy music in a physical form anymore, so the few that do are targeted for all that they're worth. Before a special edition of an album meant a couple of bonus tracks added to the end, or maybe a bonus disc. Now, anniversary or special editions of albums often come as albums of four or six discs or more. And who can forget the ultimate collector's edition with the rare vinyl single and the coffee table book weighing four pounds that come with it. If the music market can not make money by volume, they try to make it by few items for lots of money.
Interestingly, the trend of "more is more" has also carried over to independent record companies and their projects. In the old days, a tribute sampler celebrating an artist was just that. You got a dozen or so artists, they all picked a song they liked and wanted to cover and that was that. When I was young, I liked various artist tribute albums, as it was often a good way to get a bunch of high-profile artists together. Not all of my purchases worked (buying a Jimmy Rogers tribute album solely for the participating artists might have been an error of judgment if one isn't particularly a fan of Jimmy Rogers and his style), but generally I more often than not ended up with enough songs that made the album worthwhile. Recent tribute albums (or rather:album sets) have also gone gargantuan. Where before an artist had to struggle to decide on a song, today the compilers might just say "you know what, take both. Ah, what the hell, if you want a third one we can maybe find a spot for it". And so tribute albums that first morphed into double discs have now become triple or even quadruple albums.
One such project is Day Of The Dead - A Tribute To The Grateful Dead, an AIDS charity project curated by The National's Bryce and Aaron Dessner. The whole thing ballooned to 59 songs (!) running almost six hours (!!). It's probably fitting that the subject of the set are The Grateful Dead, they of the ultra-long concerts and triple or quadruple albums. Still, sometimes too much of a good thing is too much, and not all the things on that good thing are equally good. One of the things I will post here at One Buck Records at semi-regular intervals will be slimmed-down volumes of such gargantuan projects, because I prefer to have a really good time with two and a half hours of music rather than having to sit through a bunch of dead spots for six. Obviously, the new set list will reflect my taste and preferences, though if this makes you want to check out the whole thing, all the better.
My version of Day Of The Dead is a much easier to digest two (long) discs (for those that still count in discs), with some songs slightly edited for length or otherwise reworked in a way I liked. For example, I split up Bryce Dessner's long instrumental "Garcia Counterpoint" into three, so on the second disc it would function as kind of a prologue, interlude and epilogue). As usual with 4AD the line-up is hipster heaven, plus a bunch of old heroes like Lucinda Williams (who seems to be on every single tribute album ever recorded), Will Oldham a.k.a. Bonnie "Prince" Billy (who gets three tracks - and they're all excellent, so they're all present and accounted for) or one-time band member Bruce Hornsby. I was also happy to discover artists previously unknown to me like The Lone Bellow, Hiss Golden Messenger or Phosphorecent as well as international artists like the Orchestra Baobab from Senegal.
So, who's grateful for this Day Of The Dead? Hopefully it's you, dear reader, because there is some fine music contained within...
I may not love Halloween, but I've always loved Halloween and its brethren. Genre cinema has always had a certain fascination for me, from a young age, and since at that time you didn't know any better over what was considered shlock by *cough* the establishment, so I happily watched anything outside of whatever my parents' program on the household's single TV was. Case in point: A couple of years ago I watched the insufferably smug 'documentary' Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, in which people generously snarked on Cannon and its infamous founders Israelian founders Golan and Globus. People who didn't have enough of a career to comment on other people's failures (Shut the fuck up, Alex Winter! No one wants or needs your opinion!) seemingly were just hired or cut into the movie when they had a ridiculous to mean-spirited anecdote to tell. Tell you what: As a kid, I didn't know that the Cannon logo was a sign of inferior, ridiculous B-movie filmmaking. Cannon films kept a pre-teen and young teen OBG happily occuppied with their obvious entertainment value, critical appraisal be damned.
The horror genre has always been given the side-eye by *cough* serious film critics, so much that in the last years they forced themselves into a label like "elevated horror" for films which were barely genre films and in order to openly say they liked these films, but only because they are not that common, lower horror for the peasants. Me? I've always proudly wallowed in the glory of b-movies, and horror doesn't have to be elevated for me, thank you very much. One of my favorite filmmakers of all time is John Carpenter, who has a ridiculous number of modern classics under his belt: Halloween and The Thing? Two of the scariest, most relentless and well-made horror films of all time. Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York? Fantastic B-movies! In The Mouth Of Madness? Great self-referential meta-horror. Hell, even obvious second stringers like Prince Of Darkness brim with atmosphere that today's genre films - horror or other - have trouble conjuring. That Carpenter lost the plot right after Madness and his last handful of films in a quickly changing film world around him were pretty much all duds? Who cares. At least he didn't completely piss on his reputation like Dario Argento, another one of my favorites that I discovered later than Carpenter, but who suffered a similar fate: At the top of his power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, then a slow decline from the mid- to late 80s on, and then some pretty bad stuff in the 1990s. But unlike Carpenter, Argento continued making films even when they went from bad to atrocious - rarely has a film maker annoyed me more than Argento shitting on his own legacy with the horrendous third part of his witch trilogy The Third Mother, then completely fuck up his next return to the titular genre in Giallo. I rarely get angry or annoyed at movies, but with these two I regretted that he hadn't hung up his black leather gloves earlier. But I digress.
You know what still holds up in all of Carpenter's and some of Argento's films? The music, of course. Carpenter, as minimalist and repetitive as they can be, easily composed some of the most memorable film themes of all time. Argento often had as often a shaky hand as he did good taste when piking musical artists, but when it worked - such as Bill Wyman and Terry Taylor's "Valley" that ran over the opening of Phenomena - it worked like gangbusters. The problem of some horror scores is that they are in the service of jump scares, so they are full of musical stingers. Harry Manfredini's work in the Friday The 13th film series is a good example. Some went the operatic route: Philip Glass' unforgettable music for Candyman for example, or Christopher Young's massive main title for Hellbound - Hellraiser 2. Another option is the dreamy route. Scores for Alexandre Aja's remake of Maniac and David Robert Mitchell's It Follows go the synthwave route, with impressive results. Out of the few songs on the compilation, the Hess Brothers' remake of their dad's classic "Wait For The Rain" from Last House On The Left reimagined as an atmospheric 90s-style grunge rock anthem is fantastic and was used in Eli Roth's Cabin Fever.
So, what do you realistically get here? 27 pieces of music from scary movies, including a whooping five from Carpenter. As I like to offer my readers here at One Buck Records some exclusive content whenever possible, the suites for Friday The 13th, The Fog And Prince Of Darkness have been specifically created for this compilation. The suite for the former minimizes thus the aforementioned 'stinger' problem of a lot of Manfredini's score.
There's a bunch of noteworhy music coming out of the horror genre, and you get to to discover or re-discover some of it right here. Have a scary time with this and, whether you celebrate or not, a happy all hallow's eve to all...
Truth to be told: I don't really celebrate Halloween. It's not in my cultural background, we never did it when I grew up, and I'm not going to start now as a middle-aged adult just because this 'holiday' has seemingly reached every corner of the globe in the last decades. But hey, it gives me a good excuse to post something about musicians "getting in costume" and impersonating someone else. Literally.
Another shameful (?) admission: For a long time, I was a Garth Brooks fan. When I was a teenager, the media really tried to push Brooks for European audiences, through a variety of "documentaries" which essentially were barely veiled infomercials. But it worked! The stadium rock antics, zipline entrances, relatively interesting music videos and increasingly bombastic music. Having already inherited a love for country music, or more precisely classic country rock from my dad from a young age, Garth Brooks was not only a way to differentiate "my" country music from his (though you can see on these very pages that his type of country music came back with a vengeance), it also kept me with at least three toes in the mainstream, though Brooks wasn't a mainstream artist in my neck of the woods at the time. All of this was enough to see him in concert (despite, at the time, barely knowing his song book) and then, step by step, aquire his records.
Looking back at Brooks' discography now, it's much easier to see what a crass, almost cynical exercise it was. The fact that Brooks has a university degree in marketing seems to have seeped into every one of his steps once established as a major artist. The strict limit to ten tracks per album - no more, no less - , the almost mathematical construction of said albums with the required amount of ballads, stadium anthems and country humor songs, and - worst of all - the way Brooks imbued these songs with one of his many voices: There was wistful Garth, stadium Garth and the absolute worse, "humorous" hayseed Garth and his insufferable "I'm just a country boy, y'all" shtick.
Having said that, a bunch of the songs do hold up. One can't say that Brooks didn't know what he was doing. Robert Christgau said it about the Eagles, but it's also true for the Brookster: Brilliant stuff, but false.
Which brings us to the album of the day, which is false stuff, but not brilliant. It's pretty good, though. It's also not Garth Brooks. He is notoriously dedicated to protecting his music and its physical representation by all means necessary. You might not remember it, but Brooks' record company actually sued the inventors of the Mp3 technology because people could possibly steal Brooks' music with it. He has his minions scrub the internet and especially places like Youtube clean of his songs. And until very recently, there was no way to stream his music, until he signed a deal with Amazon. He still isn't on Spotify, though. Which means that people hungry to hear the hits from the good ol' days on there have to find alternatives.
And one such alternative is Mr. Brandon Garth. A dead ringer for Brooks' voice, he has now recorded three albums of Brooks covers under the very unimaginative title The Best of Brooks. Dude! Really? Garth Sings Garth was, like, right there, man! Thankfully, here at One Buck Records, we have rectified that oversight, as this is the title for the attached 15 song sampler which presents the best of The Best Of Brooks Vol. 1-3 of Brandon Garth dressing up as Garth Brooks. It's a pretty good costume, too. The arrangements sound almost exactly like the originals, as does Garth' voice, but only almost, with just enough whiffs of difference and variation. Instrumentation is tasteful and well-done, which means that while this is karaoke, it is high level karaoke (Some of the "In the Style of Garth Brooks" samplers for the CD rack of your local trucker rest stop are essentially a studio musician and his keyboard, truly horrendous stuff).
This compilation also focuses on his lesser known hit songs, rather than the true heavy hitters, because those really can't quite shake the karaoke stink, since Brooks (Garth, not Brandon!) is so associated with them. These aren't deep cuts exactly, obviously, otherwise Garth (Brandon, not Brooks!) wouldn't have recorded them, but they are slighly less known maybe than "The Thunder Rolls" or "Friends In Low Places". And that aforementioned "putting on voices"-thing that bugs some of Garth' (Brooks, not Brandon) work? He tries, but Garth (Brandon, not Brooks) doesn't quite get to the garish "here's this voice, so you know how to feel"-level of some of the other Garth's stuff. So, yeah, in some strange ways, these copies are maybe more enjoyable than the originals. They are definitely worth a spin, dear reader, so get into a different kind of Halloween spirit with Garth singing Garth...
There never seemed to be only one Gene Clark. At any time, there seemed to be two, at least. Often they were in a configuration Robert Louis Stevenson would recognize: Dr. Eugene and Mr. Geno. The shy, affable country boy from Tipton, Missouri and the sportscar-driving, heavily drinking star from L.A. By late 1969, the two warring sides had already taken its toll. Heavy drinking united Gene and partner in crime Doug Dillard, the two pillars of Dillard & Clark, but it also helped exarcerbate tensions, especially when Dillard's paramour Donna Washburn started to take on a more Yoko Ono-like role while Dillard himself pushed the group into a fast bluegrass direction in which there was no place for Gene's patented mid-tempo ballads. So by the end of 1969 Gene was out of the group he founded, and he needed to recharge and rethink. And he found the perfect place to do so in Mendocino, or more precisely in Little River, a tiny rural commune just outside of it. Here, he could just be Harold Eugene Clark, songwriter and soon after hippie husband, then budding family man; not Gene Clark, ex-Byrd and rock'n'roll star.
Mendocino became a place for a spiritual rebirth of Clark. Far from the distractions and temptations of the big city, he was as prolific as he was ever going to be. He wrote more than two dozen songs there from late 1969 to early 1971. Some of these turned up as Clark's self-titled (by accident at the printer's!) second solo album, although among fans (and pretty much to everyone these days) it is known as White Light. It was a markedly stronger outing than his merely okay solo debut With The Gosdin Brothers, with not a single weak song in the bunch and featuring several classics such as "For A Spanish Guitar" (that Bob Dylan himself complimented), "With Tomorrow", "Where My Love Lies Asleep" or "Because Of You". Certainly one of the strongest singer/songwriter of the period, or any period really, though due to - among other things - Clark's unwillingness to promote the record it sold little, the story of Clark's life as a solo artist. But what is also amazing about White Light is what didn't end up on the record. From a number of outtakes from the album, to the string of demos he recorded in early 1971 in preparation, the quality of his work at the time was uniformly strong.
Which is where the album of the day, another One Buck Records exclusive comes in. Mendocino Dream is assembled from the acoustic solo demos published on The Lost Sessions, the demos of songs that weren't on the album from Here Tonight: The White Light Demos and the outtakes from the album. Considering the sparse production of the album, they all go marvelously together and Mendocino Dream is almost as strong as the White Light album itself. Other artists would kill for a collection of songs that rival these outtakes! The album opener sets up the credo for Clark's Mendocino dream, as he proclaims to go "Back To The Earth Again". From there we go through the excellent outtakes "Opening Night" and "Winter In", which arguably could have and should have been on White Light, as well as his cover of "Stand By Me", that in turn was wisely left off the album at the last second. The solo demos, guitar and voice for the earlier ones and a bunch of tracks with harmonica for the later ones, reveal among some trademark delicate balladry one of Clark's most obvious Dylan homages/imitations, "Please Mr. Freud". The cover art is based on a watercolor painting of Mendocino village around 1970 by Gerald Gleeson.
Clark's constant battle against himself meant that his Mendocino dream couldn't last, a couple of years after the release of the album he left Little River and for all intents and purposes the family he raised there. And that very battle within the man also took his toll on his recording career, as his days at a major label were pretty much done by the time he left his dream house in Little River, though it is immortalized on the cover of 1978's Two Sides To Every Story. The messes he got himself in of course also mean that Clark fans will be left with numerous fragments of the roads not taken, a situation both exciting when a bunch of new demos or outtakes finally released and incredibly frustrating, when one realizes how much great music was left on the table because Clark couldn't help himself but to repeatedly sabotage his career.
And yet we have reminders of what could and should have been, reminders like Mendocino Dream, chock full of the melodicism, beauty and mystery Gene, the country dreamer up there in Mendocino, was known for. Let's join him in his dream for a while...
Your mission, should you accept it, is to finally post a comment under this post and push the comments into double digits!
This message will self-destruct in 3 seconds.
3 - 2 - 1 ...whoops, the powder got wet, I guess...
So, friends and neighbours, how will I get some of you to finally comment?
Why, I'll have you talk about the merits of classic albums, of course! If music nerds like something almost as much as compiling lists, it's that! It's my best gambit, so don't disappoint me!
So, this is how the Best Album Eliminator works:
I have drawn albums from one of those "Best Albums Of All Time" lists and assigned them seeds. It'll be like March Madness, but in, like; October (and November). 32 classic albums will confront each other and it is YOUR vote that counts. But not only! Tell us which album you prefer and why! Use your commenting ability to tell us a little about both albums and, if push came to shove, which one you would prefer!
So, music fans, get ready for the first region:
Pet Sounds (1) - Remain In Light (8)
Velvet Underground And Nico (4) - Astral Weeks (5)
Dark Side Of The Moon (3) - Led Zeppelin IV (6)
Nevermind (2) – Thriller (7)
Let the fights begin!
Ah, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Another day in the office, another death in the office. I don't want this blog to turn into obit...
