Broadcast November-3-2012 - podcast available here. All comments are from Philip Random's notes (with some editorial diligence). Links are not necessarily to the
exact same recordings we played on-air (but we tried). Nor is every
record represented here. To hear them all, you've got to actually listen
to the podcast. 348. Pretty Things - buzz the jerk Right back to the beginning of the pop apocalypse. It's 1965 and whatever's going down in London, whatever mix of drugs, fashion, overall youth discontent is erupting -- it's good, it's working, it's immortal ... for slightly less than two minutes anyway in the case of Buzz The Jerk.
347. Small Faces - whatcha gonna do about it? It's the noise that hooked me on this one. Only 1966 and it was already way out of control, yet the Small Faces grasped it long enough to deliver a shard of sheer fun and spite.
346. Eurythmics - savage The Eurythmics were actually quite cool at first, a real breath of fresh and soulful air in amongst all the synth-pop of the early-mid 80s. But by 1987, I'd lost interest … except for Savage, the song. It was just so strong, bitter, yet vulnerable, too, like some 1950s hard-as-nails movie beauty losing her looks, maybe resorting to murder, but you couldn't stop feeling for her. Joan Crawford would have played her. And you would have cried at the end.
345. Bill Laswell - upright man Lay down a hot, funky groove, set some of the top musicians in the world loose over it, but tell them not to get too busy. Then drop in a few mysterious samples from the old testament, and 1982 suddenly sounds eternal.
344. Paul McCartney - too many people I believe I've been over this ground already. Paul McCartney has only ever really mattered as a solo artist when he's, to some degree, doing a John Lennon. In the case of Too Many People, that means lobbing a vaguely pissed off open letter at his former band mate and song writing partner, in which he takes him to task for his dubious Power-to-the-People sympathies of the moment. Because, ummm, well there's too many of them – people that is. But what matters most is that it rocks, Paul the nice Beatle having not yet forgotten how to do that. But he would soon.
343. NoMeansNo - self pity The memory is of getting pinned to the wall by this one at the Arts Club on Seymour, 1986 sometime, taking respite from the Expo 86 atrocities that were currently underway maybe half a K away in False Creek, the whole world having come to town to show off its ugliness. But none of it was cutting through as effectively as these three guys from Victoria who could rock their punk as hard and bloodthirsty as any band on the planet, but they also had this whole other universe of depth and invention going on. Call it epic and I wouldn't argue.
342. Van Morrison - summertime in England Of course, I discovered this in springtime in Ireland, on cassette to begin with (though I'd later buy the vinyl, of course), one of a small handful of them that I had with me as I wandered around the so-called Emerald Isle, drank Guinness, wondered what the hell I was actually doing there. Hint: it had something to do with a trip to London gone wrong, turned into a soap opera that I'll not get into here, except to say I had to escape and a friend-of-a-friend tipped me that Ireland was the place, pretty much in a depression at the time and thus dead cheap. Anyway, my rent-a-car eventually got me to a place at the northwest of Donegal known as the Bloody Foreland, so called because every now and then, at sunset, everything turned a fiery, almost unearthly red. And I saw one of them. With Summertime In England playing, of course, the last half particularly memorable, where ole Van really goes to Church. One of those moments that makes you shut up and know. God does exist and he's Van Morrison fan.
341. Daevid Allen - poet for sale It doesn't get much hippier or dippier than Daevid Allen plucking away on an acoustic guitar, waxing loose and cosmic on various things relevant to the plight of the poet in modern times. Except he suddenly starts to bite at the end. Like he's been doing a Rip-Van-Winkle for the past decade, but he's suddenly snapped awake, and holy shit, it's 1977, punk rock's erupting off in the distance, and this anger stuff, it feels good, it feels like life itself.
340. Richie Havens - no opportunity necessary, no experience required Yes covered this on one of their first albums, had some pompous fun with it. But Mr. Havens' original is much rawer, tougher, cooler. And it sounded more or less perfectly in sync with the times when I finally found it, 1998, a freebie at the dog end of a yard sale. Decades may pass us but there's still no opportunity necessary, no experience required. Whatever that even means.
339. Bob Marley - Mr. Brown Definitely the most garage I've ever heard Bob Marley sound, which probably means Lee Scratch Perry was behind the mixing board, conjuring his special magic. Not that the liner notes help much in this regard. Just Rasta Revolution, a compilation of various pre-fame Marley and the Wailers odds and ends. But they're good ones, raw and full of grit.
337. Fleetwood Mac - albatross The melody's nice but it's more the overall mournful mood that sets Albatross free. But, of course, the early Mac being a blues band, it's not really that kind of albatross, is it? It's the kind that you carry as a curse, hung around your neck, weighing you down, reminding you and all the world that you blew it, you killed a beautiful thing. Which is sort of what happened to Peter Green, the man who wrote it, his career pretty much over within the year, psychedelic drugs and mental illness finding each other in yet another tortured genius as the 1960s ran down.
336. Laurie Anderson - big science It's 1982 and Laurie Anderson (who no one I know has ever heard of) has suddenly painted a picture of the future. Equal parts beautiful, yet strangely, already haunted. The whole album's a gem but the title track deserves special mention for the way it delivers this future – all shopping malls, drive-in banks, every man for himself, and yodeling. And then there's the big science itself, those cooling towers off the edge of town, higher than any church steeple ever reached, hissing and droning, liable to melt down and explode at any moment. Hallelujah to that.
335. Manfred Mann's Earth Band - father of night, father of day In which a sub two minute Bob Dylan acoustic ditty about the glory of God etc gets amplified, extended, expanded, glorified. I remember hearing it on late night radio when it was new, maybe 1973, getting all excited, then discovering the serious Dylan-heads hated it. They thought it was a horrible thing to do with a Bob Dylan song. And anyway, this Bob Dylan song was dumb. It was like he believed in God or something. How uncool was that? Little did anyone realize ...
334. Grateful Dead - Blues for Allah What did one Deadhead say to the other when the drugs wore off? "These guys suck." Funny but wrong. Because I really tried to dismiss these guys, and even pulled it off for a while as long as I focused on their more normal stuff. But then something like Blues For Allah sneaks in at the end of the album of the same name, and you don't even need acid or peyote or shrooms (though they do help), it takes you to a high, deep place. You have no clear compass on where you are, but there's Allah himself sitting next to you, his feet dangling over the edge ... of all eternity.
Broadcast October-27-2012 - podcast available here. All comments are from Philip Random's notes (with some editorial diligence). Links are not necessarily to the
exact same recordings we played on-air (but we tried). Nor is every
record represented here. To hear them all, you've got to actually listen
to the podcast. 364. Pere Ubu - thirty seconds over Tokyo Pere Ubu were one of those bands you started hearing about in 1977-78 as punk finally reached the suburbs (the underside of them anyway). Not that I really heard them, just of them. But Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo would eventually find me. Because it's so damned good. I think it was the title first, reminding of the movie, a jingoistic World War 2 thing, American heroes bombing Tokyo, a suicide run, just like the record says. Except the record's so much better, and recorded way before punk, it turns out. In 1975, Cleveland, Ohio of all places. No, let me rephrase that. Cleveland, Ohio, of course. Because it had to all start in Cleveland, whatever it is that got started, that's still going on, that mad suicide mission to drop bombs, make war on all NORMALS, figuratively, of course.
363. Fun Boy Three - the lunatics have taken over the asylum It's 1982 and the Fun Boy Three (a terrible name) are laying it down in so many words. The clinic full of cynics has had its way, the lunatics are in control, we're all gonna die. No party was complete without it.
362. Tom Waits - clap hands Motron's been bugging me again. Why so little Tom Waits on the list? Because it's an act. All that blue and boozy, nicotine infused soul and cool – that's not really him. If it was, he'd have been dead long ago. But it's a damned strong act, I'll give it that, and it really had me with Rain Dogs, I admit. Like it's 3am and you're miles from home, polluted drunk, getting rained on. Except it's not real rain, is it? It's Hollywood rain, and Hollywood lights, too. Probably wasn't even real whiskey.
361. David Bowie - heroes-helden Yeah, yeah, you've heard it a million times already. We can be heroes, we can be dolphins, yadda-yadda-yadda. But have you heard the mixed German/English edit that showed up on the soundtrack for Christianne F, the most depressing movie ever? That complicated language does something to Mr. Bowie's delivery, gets it to deeper, more wrenching depths of soul and enunciation, gets you right to the heart of Berlin, late 70s, still a divided city – two opposed universes of politics and animosity grinding up against each other. Forever. Or so it seemed at the time.
360. Wire - the 15th Tight little pop song with the kind of sharp, icy edge that defines a sonic future for all mankind. Which is exactly what Wire did in 1979 with the album 154 and songs like the 15th. Hell, I didn't even hear until at least six or seven years later, called up the DJ and had to know what this new song was.
359. Elton John - madman across the water But what does it mean? I remember my friend James' big sister's boyfriend saying it was about Richard Nixon and Watergate, the crazy mess he'd made of things. He was the madman across the water. Which kind of made sense in 1974. Except it was a 1971 record, I eventually realized. The Watergate break-ins didn't even happen until 1972, and even then didn't amount to much media coverage until at least 1973. Not until after Mr. Nixon got himself massively re-elected with pretty much the biggest majority ever in American history. Anyway, those were confusing times, lots of shadows forming, maybe throwing time itself out of joint. Who knew the what of anything?
358. Primal Scream - higher than the sun This will always be the Icarus trip for me, LSD on a mountaintop, the day we all went too far, got too close to the sun, and like Icarus, our wings melted but we didn't fall so much as untether, like astronauts overshooting our orbit, ricocheting off through oblivion. Seriously, it felt like a million years before we found gravity again, got the earth beneath our feet. But actually it all happened within the running time of this particular mix of Higher Than The Sun which we had with us on that mountaintop, on cassette, playing on the ghetto blaster that we'd dragged up with us, pissing off some German tourists. So in retrospect, it wasn't the drugs at all. Just Primal Scream at the peak of their powers, in total control the entire time.
357. Boo Radleys - Lazarus Because everybody needs resurrecting every now and then. I'm pretty sure that's what this is about, name-checking Lazarus, the guy Jesus raised from the dead. I mean, we've all been there – so low we may as well be six feet under. And yet miracles do happen – great crescendos of brass erupt from oceans of dub, like the Lord's own light, shining through, turning sorrow to joy, downpour to sunshine, undeath to everlasting life (there is a difference). And in their greatest moment, the Boos got it on record.
356. Slayer - south of heaven True story. Los Angeles, 1993, a few weeks before Christmas. I'm hanging with this band I sort of know who've got a day to kill between gigs, but precious little cash to kill it with. Which means we're drinking cheap, shitty beer. Lots of it. At some point it's wisely decided that some drugs are required, marijuana to be specific. Except Terry from Idaho who's supposed to be dropping off the weed only has heroin, but it's pretty much the same price. And the thing is, none of us are that cool. We've never done heroin, but here it is getting laid out in narrow brownish lines on the coffee table, and yeah, we're all just drunk enough to not give a fuck. Even if you can die just snorting the stuff, particularly if you're not used to it, if your body hasn't built up a decent tolerance. This is not good, I'm suddenly thinking as Greg the singer rolls up a dollar bill. This is a scene from one of those movies just before everything goes horribly wrong. And then Slayer comes crashing in. Full blast on the stereo. It's Smith, the bass player, calling bullshit, enlisting no lesser ally than Lucifer himself from his haunt way south of heaven, commanding that we see things at least slightly straight. Long story/short: we just said No to the heroin, went out for burgers instead. The next morning we woke up to the news that River Phoenix had died outside the Viper Room, maybe a mile away. Some kind of overdose.
355. Magazine - permafrost It's 1979 and man it's cold out there. Back in the 50s, they called it wine, women and song. Then by the 60s, it was drugs, sex and rock and roll. Now, come almost the 80s, it's just, I will drug and fuck you on the permafrost. And it's not even the Winter of Hate yet. But you can definitely feel it coming.
354. Bee Gees - every Christian lionhearted man will show you Bee Gees' first album, psychedelic and as good as they ever got, giving all as every Christian Lionhearted band must, complete with chanting monks and mellotron from days of future past. They really are as good as the Beatles here. For three and a half minutes anyway.
353. Procol Harum - in held twas in I [rando-EDIT] Epic shit slung together from Side Two of Procol Harum's epic second album, released in 1968 when they were one of the hottest bands in the known universe. Seriously, short of Dylan and the Beatles and perhaps Cream, they were maybe the most important act on the planet based on the monstrous success of their single Whiter Shade of Pale – the record that dared marry Johann Bach to rock and roll and utter far out poetry. Of course, by 1973 when I finally got to hear Shine On Brightly, it was just a friend's big sister's record that she'd lost interest in. I guess she just didn't care about the pilgrim or his glimpses of nirvana or the Dalai Lama and his incise clarification as to the meaning of life. But I did.
In held twas in I 352. Joy Division - decades The first I heard of Joy Division, they were a new band out of Britain who were doing a sort of new wave Doors thing. The next I heard, their lead singer had killed himself. But good luck getting to hear any of the actual music. Radio wasn't playing any of it and the handful of their records that made it to town as imports were quickly scooped up by people far cooler than me or anyone I was connected with. So it was all just mystery for a long while until finally, in some guy's car, I heard Decades (as suitable an epitaph as anyone ever wrote for themselves) on a mixtape. And strangely, it was almost exactly what I expected. Dark and deep just like Jimbo the Lizard King, except all the edges were hard, the lines sharp, the angles fierce. Like nothing I'd ever heard before, but I could feel it coming anyway.
