967.
Wall of Voodoo - call of the west
The thing I remember about Wall of Voodoo live
at the Luv Affair in 1982 was front man Stanard Ridgway making fun of all the
weird haircuts in the crowd (it was the early 80s and the Luv Affair was
definitely Vancouver's ground zero for fashion weirdness and extremity). Needless to say, there was tension in
the room. Someone (probably venue
staff) even started tossing ice cubes at the band. But Wall of Voodoo rose to it with their sharp, raw, sort of
film noir infected gothic industrial west coast surf RAWK sound (with a cowboy
edge). As I recall, the show ended
with an epic charge through Call of the West, which forever diminished the album
version for me. Still pretty
damned good, but nothing like actually being there.
966.
Public Image Limited – warrior [randoEDIT]
Pumped up remix of a track from a less than
stellar latter day Johnny Rotten album. The sample from Little Big Man (the
greatest movie ever of all time when I was eleven) definitely helps. Old Lodge Skins, the old blind Cheyenne
chief, just lays it all out for us:
"Thank you for making me a human being – Thank you for helping me
to become a warrior – Thank you for my victories and my defeats – It is a good
day to die". I still haven't
found a better prayer.
warrior [randoEDIT]
965.
Jean-Michel Jarre - zoolookologie
In the early/mid 1980s, it seemed there were
only two samplers in the world – the Fairlight and the Synclavier. But they weren't called samplers then,
they were just these hugely expensive digital synthesizers ($50,000 bucks
sounds about right) that could feed a sound into, say the hum from your fridge
or a baby crying, and then muck with it, play it back as music. Strangely, when new age
synth-noodler/sleep-inducer Jean-Michel Jarre got his hands on one, the results
ended up being quite funky.
964.
Executive Slacks - the bus
Another of those seminal industrial thrash
outfits who did their bit for the greater evolution of all mankind in the
mid-1980s, then disappeared (from my view anyway). Specifically, they gave us this nasty little ditty about the
horrors of riding a packed bus.
"Oh no – our legs are touching."
963.
Aerosmith - toys in the attic
From way the hell back when they were still a
properly dangerous rawk band, with needles in their veins, sleaze up to their
eyeballs and no talk of Betty Ford or her clinic. The title track from Toys in the Attic is about as raw as
rawk got in 1975 – punk before punk.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I heard it for the first time while wandering
through some girl's living room, drunk, a house-destroying partying going on
all around me, shards of glass everywhere, amazed that somehow the record was
still playing.
961.
Alan Parsons Project - I Robot
Alan Parsons hadn't gone horribly wrong yet in
1977. In fact, if you were halfway
cool (but still not cool enough for punk) you were probably listening to I
Robot, digging the smooth and spacey future it was suggesting. Apparently it was a concept album,
derived from the Isaac Asimov book.
I just dug it as a better than average stoner option. But it never got better than the lead
off, title track.
954.
Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland 1945
In case you haven't noticed, though the cut-off
date for this thing is officially August 2000, there's very little in the way
of 1990s stuff on the list. This
is because it's an all vinyl apocalypse we're exploring here and I pretty much
stopped buying new vinyl in 1989 (for various reasons, mostly related to the
advent of CDs). One album I did
have to buy on vinyl was 1998's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk
Hotel. Because the cover's a
damned fine work of art and because it just HAD to be heard in analogue form,
with hisses and crackles, and other great fat imprecisions thundering up my ear
canals. And all that semen
staining the mountaintops.
953.
Peter Gabriel - [start] I don't remember
If I was putting together a list such as this
in 1983, Peter Gabriel would've been all over it. In Genesis, out of Genesis. Obscure b-sides.
Anything and everything. I
was a FAN. Which is short for
fanatic, which is "… one who believes or behaves with uncritical zeal,
particularly with regard to an extreme religious or political cause or in some
cases sports, or some other obsessive enthusiasm."
This is not healthy. I was
not healthy. I honestly
half-believed that he (Peter Gabriel) was going to single-handedly save all
humanity with his cool music and unblemished political and moral consciousness,
and he'd do it without ever releasing a crap record, or otherwise being uncool
in my fawning eyes. But then he
hooked up with Rosanna Arquette and started releasing preposterously popular
songs that even horrible people loved – people who also loved Duran Duran,
Power Station, Huey Lewis + The News.
I Don't Remember pre-dates all that.
952.
Residents - beyond the valley of a day in
the life
Sampling, stealing, pirating, mashing the
Beatles a good three decades before such things were hip. The crazy thing is, I actually heard
this when it was new, in 1976. A friend's big brother heard me talking loud about how
great progressive rock was, because it was so inventive, so ambitious, so
strange. So he got me high and set
me straight that there were far, far stranger things out there, including this
anti-group from California somewhere who were so mysterious nobody even knew
who they were, maybe they weren't even human, they certainly didn't look human
when they played live, with huge eyeballs on their heads. And they didn't really sound human
either.
951.
Kinks - celluoid
heroes
I remember
hearing this as a kid and almost
crying. And that was before I'd
seen any number of friends (and friends of friends) throw everything they had
into some kind of showbiz career, and not just for the art of it, but also the
glory, the big dream of being loved by everyone everywhere forever. And none of them ever achieved it. Nobody ever does really. Those famous faces you do see – they're
not really real, just hallucination monsters created by the great and hungry
beast that runs the spectacle and needs to eat human souls to stay alive.
949.
Nektar -
remember the future [randoEDIT]
From the
cover of Nektar Live, which is not the album this comes from: "To produce for the eye what the
ear heard, Brocket utilized six projectors, two strobelights, slides and liquid
lights. He has since added three
screens supported by 64 sections of scaffolding and illuminated by eight slide
projectors and a 16mm projector, with the entire visual show being housed in
four giant lighting and control towers." Yeah, that's exactly what Nektar sounded like to my
cosmically deprived ears in the mid-70s.
This EDIT tidies up the first half of Remember The Future, a full album
concept about a blind boy and an alien and how we should never forget the
future, which is kind of paradoxical if you really think about it.
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