The James Gang – Bluebird

The James Gang

Listen/Download – The James Gang – Bluebird

Greetings all.

Here’s hoping that he new week finds you all well.

The James Gang is one of those groups that I knew OF before I was familiar with any or their music.

Joe Walsh’s pre-Eagles solo work was a major part of my teenaged/stoner listening, but it wasn’t until my early 20s that I was blown away by the JG’s version of ‘Stop’.

At that time (and for a few years afterward) I assumed that the song was an original, until one fine day, at a cookout of Mr Luther’s, what should I hear flowing from the stereo but Howard Tate’s original version of the song (as written and produced by Jerry Ragovoy).

I was blown away by my introduction to Howard Tate (who would become a fave), and would find myself with more respect for the taste of Joe Walsh and his James Gang bandmates.

It would be a few more years before I would get my hands on a copy of their debut LP, 1969’s ‘Y’er Album’.

It was then that I discovered that they had not only covered Howard Tate, but also the Yardbirds ‘Lost Woman’ as well as one of my all-time favorite Buffalo Springfield songs, today’s selection ‘Bluebird’.

The Buffalo Springfield recorded no fewer than three versions (maybe four if you include the 45 edit) of Bluebird, including the epic nine-minute version that would appear on the ‘Retrospective’ collection from the early 70s, and the unreleased version that would only appear in an episode of the TV series ‘Mannix’ in 1967.

The James Gang’s first album exists (for me, anyway) in that sweet spot between early psychedelia and mud-encrusted, festival jamming excess, with a lyrical vibe that would soon be sacrificed on the altar of bluesy stomp (by pretty much every rock band of the era).

The James Gang version opens with piano and orchestra, before the band comes in, quietly at around :25 with some backwards guitar, which gives way to power chords, bass and drums.

You get a little of the band’s patented, ‘Live at Leeds-y’ stomp, before things get quieter and open up into the verse.

The James Gang translates the multi-layered guitar approach of the Springfield into a simpler, power-trio sound, but they do it with a tremendous amount of respect for the original.

The sound gets suitably far out for 1969, with enough headphone juice (if you know what I mean and I think that you do) in case you want to mellow out and give things a close listen.

The rest of the album is quite good, and ought not be too hard to find.

I hope you dig it, and I’ll see you all next week.

Peace

Larry

 

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Freak Out with the Osmond Brothers

The Osmond Brothers

Listen/Download – The Osmonds – Traffic In My Mind

Greetings all.

Greetings all.

“The Osmonds?” you say to yourself incredulously.

What? You didn’t know the Osmond brothers got their freak on in 1973 with their concept album about the Mormon faith?

Despite the patented weirdness of that sentence, it’s all true….I swear.

Actually, the Osmond horde were – despite their wholesome façade – capable of the occasional piece of outstanding music (see their version of Joe South’s ‘Yo Yo’).

‘Traffic In My Mind’ certainly falls into that category, but it is also something else indeed.

No matter how ‘Mormon’ the boys were, and they were REALLY Mormon, they clearly kept their ears open to the wider musical scene, and today’s selection is proof of that.

I think that the album was something of a sneak attack, with the blandest possible cover (a pencil drawing of the brothers) containing an interesting collection of tunes, the most interesting of which (by far) was ‘Traffic in My Mind’.

Sounding more like a salad tossed from bits of Alice Cooper and Grand Funk Railroad, ‘Traffic In My Mind’ runs on heavy, fuzzed out guitar, wailing vocals and sounds NOTHING like an Osmond Brothers record should.

I can’t imagine anyone but a hardcore Osmonds fan picking this out of a sonic line-up, which is a good thing.

I’m not here to tell you that this is anything but an anomaly, but it’s a good one, so there’s that.

Then of course there’s their next album, where they recorded with HB Barnum, covered a Solomon Burke tune, and appeared on the cover looking the an all-Mormon remake of ‘The Mack’.

I hope you dig it, and I’ll see you all next week.

Peace

Larry

 

 

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

Ian McLagan 1945 – 2014

Ian McLagan

The Firm of Jones, McLagan, Lane and Marriott

The Faces – Jones, Stewart, Wood, McLagan and Lane 

 

Listen/Download – The Small Faces – Tin Soldier MP3

Listen/Download – The Faces – (I Know) I’m Losing You (Live at the BBC)

Listen/Download – The Faces – Oh Lord I’m Browned Off

Greetings all.

This week the world of music was stunned by the sudden death of legendary keyboardist Ian McLagan.

McLagan was lucky enough to have manned the keys in both the Small Faces (replacing Jimmy Winston in 1965) and then following some of his bandmates into the slightly larger Faces.

As someone who grew up in a house where the piano loomed large (thanks to my old man) I have always had a healthy respect for keyboard players, and Ian McLagan was among the best.

He was also – as were many of his ilk – cursed by his position in the band to fade into the woodwork.

Frontment, guitarists and bassists have the luxury of moving around the stage, playing the fool, and the drummer – in addition to often being the loudest goon on the bandstand, is usually right there in the middle of things.

The poor keyboardist (lead singers like Steve Winwood excepted) are often on the side of the stage, seated behind some huge appliance made of wood and wires, providing much of the musical texture, yet out of sight, and as usually follows, out of mind.

As you may already be aware, especially if you follow Funky16Corners, I am a certified Hammond organ and electric piano nut, so my ears have always been attuned to Mac’s prodigious skills.

At his very best, Mac was the epitome of the team player, eschewing the bombast of contemporaries like Keith Emerson, choosing instead to add layers, and more importantly, punctuation of a sort. He used the piano and organ to add texture and emphasis to songs.

The first track I’m featuring today appeared here at Iron Leg back in 2010, and is for me the finest thing the Small Faces ever did. ‘Tin Soldier’, recorded in 1967 is the perfect intersection of the group’s R&B roots and the more progressive direction things were moving in at the time.

‘Tin Soldier’ is a master class in rock dynamics, due in large part to McLagan’s electric piano, which sets the tone, and (with the organ) lays the foundation for the entire song. The electric piano break at 1:29 is as powerful as anything that ever appeared on a Small Faces record.

The Faces were another bag entirely. With Rod Stewart and Ron Wood (it took two regular humans to replace Steve Marriott) added to the mix things got a whole lot shaggier but the mix was every bit as potent as with the Small Faces.

I’m including two Faces tracks here, one that illustrates Mac’s power as a sideman, and the second an organ feature.

The Faces cover of the Temptations ‘(I Know) I’m Losing You’ – recorded by the band but released as part of Rod Stewart’s solo LP ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’ – is one of the band’s best known recordings. This version, recorded live for the BBC ‘Sounds For Saturday’ program in 1971, once again features McLagan’s electric piano as a prominent voice. As loud as Ronnie Wood’s guitar is, Mac’s piano is right there with him, and when you get to 2:05, and the band drops back (except to hum), and the piano comes in by itself, it’s a thing to behold.

The last track is ‘Oh Lord I’m Browned Off’, which appeared as the b-side to the single of ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’. A Wood/McLagan/Lane/Jones composition, the Hammond-led instro starts off like a distant cousin of the Turtles’ ‘Buzz Saw’, rolling out into a funky groove with plenty of solo time for McLagan and some bottleneck guitar from Wood.

Following the demise of the Faces, McLagan followed Wood into the New Barbarians, formed his own Bump Band, played for years with Billy Bragg, and recorded as a sideman for all kinds of people.

He had been living in Austin, TX for many years when he passed away.

He will be missed.

See you next week.

 

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners some soul

The Rugbys – You, I

The Rugbys

Listen/Download – The Rugbys – You, I

Greetings all.

Whilst strolling aimlessly through the back alleys of the windows of my hard drive, it occurred to me that I had never posted the record you see before you today (except for an appearance in a mix).

The Rugbys were a Kentucky band that specialized in a certain brand of what might be called “early American heavy”.

Though they got their start during a more genteel, psychedelic era, they laid down ‘You, I’ right on the cusp of flower power getting obscured by acres and acres of mud and amplifiers.

I think it would be fair to trace most of this back to the Cream (a band who’s sticky, hash-oil fingerprints are all over this record), with the volume, and the wah-wah and the heavy drums and of course the Jack Bruce-ian vocals.

The Rugbys had already had some local success with their cover of Doug Sahm’s ‘Walking the Streets Tonight’, but when they unleashed ‘You, I’ on the world they had a monster on their hands.

The record was an instant smash in Louisville, and was soon Top 40 (often Top 20) in much of the rest of the country.

This is where I have to take a detour to question why- if this song was so successful – had I never heard it until a few years ago?

Sure, the Rugbys were heavy, even treading delicately over the border into Stooges territory for a few moments, but then so was Blue Cheer, who had a similarly sized hit with ‘Sumertime Blues’ the year before, which never seems to go away.

There’s an argument to be made that Blue Cheer, though they might have been a tad, how do you say, dumber, were in the long run a far more consistent band than the Rugbys, laying down a blueprint that legions of filthy hippies (said with nothing but love, of course) would follow decades hence, whereas the Rugbys didn’t seem to have their eyes planted quite as securely on the prize, having a tendency to get a little more in the words of the great Chico Marx – tootsie frootsie.

People have always assumed that the end of the 60s was some kind of hippie paradise, but I’d argue that a listen to the first Stooges album is a much clearer snapshot of the era. There is no arguing with the potency of ‘You, I’, especially the last 30 seconds which paint a very vivid picture of the way the worm was turning that year.

It’s a groovy 45, and one you ought to be able to pick up for a couple of bucks.

So dig it, and I’ll see you next week.

Peace

Larry

 

 

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

DMZ – Out of Our Tree

DMZ

Listen/Download – DMZ – Out of Our Tree

Greetings all.

The past month or so has been an especially tasty one in regard to the acquisition of new (old) records, including some long (long, LONG) time want list items (for here and over at Funky16Corners).

It was during the digimatization process, and plowing through the crates to prep for the next episode of the Iron Leg Radio Show, that I happened upon an especially old record that I had unjustly neglected for years.

Flash back to the very early 80s, and my brothers and I are hanging out in our parents backyard, doing nothing remotely productive, and we happen to hear on the radio that REM were going to be playing that evening at the Capitol Theater in Passaic.

We rapidly dragged ourselves out of our lawn chairs (without spilling our beer) and hightailed it up to Crazy Eddies.

You see, back in the olden days, before the computers and the beep-beep, bloop bloop and what not, you used to have to go somewhere special to buy concert tickets, usually Ticketron (anyone remember those rainbow colored tickets?).

There were a couple of Ticketron outlets nearby, one inside of a Macys department store (?!?) and the other inside Crazy Eddies.

Crazy Eddies was (for those of you too young or too far from the NY area to remember) an appliance/record/tape chain, with lunatic TV commercials, that eventually collapsed under the weight of its founder’s criminal activity.

Though I wouldn’t generally go to Crazy Eddies specifically to buy records (for guys like us it was a place to get stereo equipment and blank tapes), if I’m in a store, and there are records to be had, who am I to look the other way??

So, we buy our tickets for the show, and I headed over to the “imports” section, where in addition to overpriced French prog rock albums, you could find all kinds of domestic independent label stuff.

Though I can’t be 100% sure, I think this was also the day I grabbed the Vipers Jem/PVC LP, but the real score (though I didn’t know it at the time) was a remaindered copy of a four or five year old release by a band called DMZ.

DMZ, formed in 1976 and dead in the water two years later, is now best known as the band that introduced the world to the charms of Jeff Conolly, aka Mono Mann.

It was still a few years before I would hear about the Lyres, so that meant nothing at the time, but I did recognize that the album included a cover of the Sonics ‘Cinderella’, so I forked over my 99 cents, and headed home.

While my ears were still stuffed full of sweet, power pop/new wave candy, I had started to develop a taste for punk (zee raw, seexteez zound) and DMZ brought it.

I found myself dropping the needle on the opning track, ‘Mighty Idy’ a lot, but the cut that really rattled my cage is the one you see before you today, a cover of the Wailers 1966 slammer ‘Out of Our Tree’.

The importance of the damp, depressing Pacific Northwest to the development of punk, 60s and beyond cannot be underestimated.

Bands like the Kingsmen, the Sonics, Don and the Goodtimes, and Paul Revere and the Raiders all made awesome sounds (some, like the Sonics far beyond awesome), but the mighty Wailers were there first.

The group had their first hit with ‘Tall Cool One’ in 1959 (again in 1964), and over the next few years their R&B/frat sound morphed in sometimes savage garage punk.

‘Out of Our Tree’ was released in 1966 and it is one of those records that wears the era like a badge of honor.

You get pounding drums, combo organ, fuzzed out guitars and wailing (of course) vocals, and the overall effect is powerful enough to shoot grandma out of her chair like a roman candle.

Conolly, one of the great rock and roll maniacs and a devoted record collector brought his love of 60s punk to DMZ, and the result was very cool indeed.

Now, if you were to set to Googling, you would discover that there is something of a critical consensus out there which suggests that the DMZ album suffers from sub-par production by Flo and Eddie.

I am here to tell you that this is bunk.

Whether this is a case of “I don’t think it sounds punk (read, INEPT) enough!” or “I love the Lyres and this doesn’t sound enough like the Lyres!” I can’t say for sure, though both schools of thought seem to be in play.

Having been around then, I fully understand the tendency to associate clean, professional production with ‘the man’ and loosey goosey indie 45s recorded in a basement somewhere to be the ne plus ultra, but as is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I would suggest getting yourself a copy of the album (or just download the MP3 here), and turn it the fuck up.

The production is right on the money for 1978. DMZ sound like an era-appropriate punk band and Flo and Eddie gave the bass and drums (especially the drums) quite a bit of sonic punch.

Jeff is solidly savage, and while the organ could be a tiny bit louder, it is there, and you’d have to be a fool to deny that DMZ does the Wailers proud.

Not long after DMZ imploded, Conolly, Rick Corraccio and Paul Murphy went on to form the Lyres, one of the greatest live bands of the 1980s and beyond.

As always, I hope you dig the sounds, and I’ll see you next week.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

The Giant Crab – ESP

Giant Crab

Listen/Download – The Giant Crab – ESP

Listen/Download – The Giant Crab – Hot Line Conversation

Greetings all.

I hope you all have your go-go shoes laced up and a snootful of Owsley’s finest rocket fuel, though if you don’t, pouring today’s selection into your earholes should suffice.

Though I haven’t written about the Giant Crab before, I have played their tunes on the Iron Leg Radio Show more than a few times.

I first heard of the band many, many years ago, when I saw their album covers in an old coffee table book.

I didn’t actually hear their music until a few years ago when I was lucky enough to come into possession of their ‘Cool It…Helios’ album.

That record was a very pleasant surprise indeed.

Though it opened with a bizarre interlude that suggested full-on psychedelic transit, what the grooves of the album revealed was in fact a very soulful group.

When I did a some research I was blown away to discover that the Giant Crab weren’t a bunch of crusty hippies, but in fact two sets of brothers (Orosco and Friscia) from East LA.

They got their start in a band called Ernie and the Emperors, and after some of the members went off to the Army, reconstituted as the Giant Crab in 1967.

Their two albums move between garage, psyche pop, soul and heavier rock, with the band’s sound evolving along the way.
So much so, that by the time they dropped today’s selection in 1969 they had gone all the way over into Blue Cheer-ville.

What is especially interesting, and you may already have dug this if you clicked on the link, is that ‘ESP’ is in fact a thinly disguised rewrite of the Pretty Things 1966 single ‘LSD’.

‘ESP’ is crazy heavy, flanged, organ and guitar driven madness. It’s hard to listen to it without imagining one of those pulsating psychedelic light shows pushing you to the brink of a seizure.

As much as I dig the Pretties OG, I’d go as far as to say that the Giant Crab win this contest hands down.

The flipside, ‘Hot Line Conversation’ is also quite heavy, and pretty far out as well, with the sound effects. There is definitely some Vanilla Fudge in the mix here.

This is some serious shit right here, and ought to be much better known.

Wow.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

The Rattles – I Know You Don’t Know

The Rattles

Listen/Download – The Rattles – I Know You Don’t Know

Greetings all.

I hope the new week finds you well, and that you all had a chance to download and listen to last week’s edition of the Iron Leg Radio Show.

The record I offer up today is something that I grabbed, sight unheard at a record show a few years back.

I knew of the Rattles, but mainly in their earlier, R&Beat incarnation, of which I had seen old bootleg videos back in the garage/mod days.

I had also heard their biggest hit ‘The Witch’, which made it into the US Top 40 in 1970.

By that time, all of the old-school Rattles had been shed like so much dead skin and replaced with a hairier, scarier bunch led by singer Edna Bejarano (maybe the only heavy rock singer named Edna EVER??).

When I picked up the 45 of ‘I Know You Don’t Know’ I assumed that the 1971 date on the 45 put it in a heavier bag, but I (really) had no idea.

When I got it home, expecting I know not what, I was genuinely shocked when the needle hit the record and something akin to early, heavy glam came shooting out of the speakers.

Both sides of the 45 are similarly constructed, with almost-heavy metal guitars and drums backing Bejarano’s just this side of shrill wailing.

‘I Know You Don’t Know’ gets started with a decidedly more ‘good-timey’ vibe than it ends up with which is cool because what they end up bashing out is quite tasty indeed.

If you get a chance, check out some of the early-70s stuff by the Rattles on Youtube. The dudes in the band look like they just rolled out of the North Sea Mud and Leather Festival, but Bejarano is a trip, especially in the promo clip for ‘The Witch’, in which she is suitably witch-like.

That said, I hope you dig the track, and I’ll see you all next week.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.