Did you ever read This is Not Pitchfork?

Well, that up above is not a Pitchfork. It's a strange Russian tractor. But This is Not Pitchfork is a pretty fun page where a woman with far better writing skills than me goes through her record collection. Unfortunately, she stopped and went to Tumblr in 2009 or so, so there isn't much new stuff. But she's exactly my age, from the US and from the north. Granted, she's from a big city and I'm here in Cleveland (or close enough), but I like the way she reviews her records. You may not get any idea what the record is all about, and I like that. I mean, if I decide to review Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, I may hardly mention the music at all. Why should I? They still play every song on it on oldies radio all the time. Everyone is familiar with it. But it's interesting to get a different take on it, like what was happening when it was popular. It's interesting to me, anyway.

So if you get time (and really, if you're reading my blog you've apparently got plenty of time), check it out. I'm mildly inspired by it. Hell, someone should take its place, and I'm someone.

Manfred Mann's Earth Band - Solar Fire

In 1973 I had no idea what Progressive Rock was, and quite frankly, I didn't care. All I knew was when my friend Chris' sister Marcy got this album I couldn't hear it enough. I'm the oldest of the kids in my family, so I kind of glommed on to the older siblings of my friends to get some kind of direction when it came to music. Marcy (probably unknowingly) had a record collection I envied very much when I was 11, and this was the album I envied most of all.

I bought my own. Several times. I've worn this record out at least five times. The last copy I got before I found it on CD was one my brother got me for Christmas. I told him to get me that album, my reason being that mine was trashed, yet again, and it was apparently out of print. I don't know where he found it, but he did, and I still have it. I've got the CD too, but the record is better.

I love the whole album, but Saturn, Lord of the Ring/Mercury The Winged Messenger is easily my favorite. I'm not a big instrumental music kind of person, but Mick Rogers' guitar solo on that one made him my very first guitar god. I can actually just listen to it in my head any time I want because I've played it so many times. I'm pretty sure this one is just ground into my psyche and nothing can change it. I think that based on my love of this album, I can actually listen to some of their later, considerably crappier and way more boring attempts at hitting the Top 40 with songs by Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan. In the great Progressive Rock Pantheon I doubt this album scores all that highly, but on my list of records I can't live without, this is probably in my top ten.

Yeah. Really.

The Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

You can say what you want about this album, or The Sex Pistols. I don't care if you think it belongs in the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame, or in a garbage can. It changed the whole damn show for me. It changed my whole outlook on music, and it's a big part of why I listen to what I listen to today.

I got it for my birthday in 1978. Denise and BJ (still dear friends to this day), gave me a present in school at lunch. I opened the package, knowing it was a record, but just wondering what in the hell these two girls would get me. This was it. All pink and green and so foreign looking. No wizard on the cover, no pretty girl, no dude with a guitar and a guitargasm face. Just a statement that I figured meant what it means, but I was 16 and had never heard anyone use the term bollocks before. I had talked about The Sex Pistols, and I had heard Anarchy in the UK on college radio. I knew it would be different, just because of all the looks I got in school carrying it around (I was 16, I had a record that most people had never heard of, and I carried it around in the hall until I cut out and went home and listened to it). I played side 2 first so I could hear the song I knew.

Man, I loved it! It was short and got right to the point. The music was biting and harsh. The lyrics seemed like the kind of political stuff that could get you disappeared (hey, I was 16). I loved every minute of it, and I was sure all my friends would, too. The next day in school I thanked Denise and BJ profusely, probably with a doob out in the smoking lounge (yeah, we could smoke in school), and I told everyone I saw it was the coolest record in years. Most people asked me why WMMS didn't play it, if it was so cool, and I had no answer. So I took it to a party that Friday night.

The party was at a guy's house that I didn't know very well, and whom I think moved shortly thereafter, because we really liked a lot of the same music, except Led Zeppelin. After we were a lot of beers in, I asked if I could play my new record, and he said, "Hell, yeah!" The console stereo in the living room was cranked and out comes the screaming, political without really saying anything, Holidays in the Sun. This guy Mark and I just started stomping around doing some adolescent boogaloo that required lots of yelling and pushing each other around, and three songs into it, we notice the entire fucking party has gone out to the kitchen, and even the patio outside, in the snow. No one stayed in the room, and I was kind of dejected and figured he'd take the record off, put on J. Geils and get his party back inside.

He didn't. He pushed me, we did shots of his dad's booze and stomped around the living room until the whole record played through. I was hot, I was sweaty and I knew that I didn't give a fuck what anyone else thought of The Sex Pistols, I fucking loved them and I knew I was gonna dig this new Punk Rock that was just starting to catch on. When the second side finished I went and puked over the front railing of his porch, ingratiating myself forever to some girl who was a senior and her boyfriend who looked like he wanted to beat me up.

Mark and I talked about music a lot for a few months after that, then I just never saw him again. Maybe summer came, I don't know. Maybe his parents blamed me for a drunken party. Whatever. I quit caring what most other people thought about what I listened to after that. I started to understand that most of my favorite music was going to be a journey I had to take on my own for the most part, and I was excited to be RIGHT THERE when Punk came out. I didn't get to see any shows really, but I found some of the records and met some older people that would turn me on to other bands, all because I loved that Sex Pistols album. It changed everything.

Yes - Yessongs

I remember the day I bought this 3 record monstrosity the very first time (this copy is my second, and it's a little noisy but good enough). I was at an old record store called Daisy Music Company. I had saved my allowance for what seemed like a thousand years so that I could buy this Yes album with every damned song I knew by them on it. It was 1973, I was 11 and I just knew this would make me the coolest kid on the planet. Hey, I had no idea how completely uncool progressive rock was, and to this day I still think Yes was a great band that had a lot going on for them. I never said I was cool, just that I thought I could be when I was 11.

I remember once when I was at a party some time when I was older than 11 year old me, and there were actual college guys there, and they had commandeered the stereo. The stereo was always my favorite place to hang out at a party because I could talk about music all night (still can, ask my wife, who gets easily bored with that!). I was pretty obsessive about Yes for awhile, and they were my first favorite band in the whole wide world. But back to the party with actual adults that could buy their own booze, and didn't mind my being around. So I'm hanging out at the stereo, mostly listening to these guys talk about bands I had only read about and playing some of those albums, and I'm getting a little plowed and someone finds Fragile and decides to play that. These guys get to geeking out on how incredible the musicians in Yes are, and I'm totally into this, and the subject goes to Yessongs. These guys are talking about how awesome Bill Bruford is on it and one of them says, "He's just so amazing on Close to the Edge, with all the time changes and stuff." Everyone agrees to his brilliance and I'm thinking, "He only plays on three songs on that album, and that's not one of them." So I work up a little nerve and spit out probably close to verbatim on the back album cover, "Alan White plays drums on all tracks except for Perpetual Change, Long Distance Runaround and The Fish." I get a look from our drumming expert that's like, "Shut up, dick;" and I'm wishing I had kept my mouth shut until one of the other guys that seemed to really know his shit and was apparently the Geek Squad Leader, says. "I think the kid is right. Bruford left for King Crimson shortly after Fragile came out."

"Yeah!" I'm thinking. "I had something to offer that these guys that know everything didn't know" (it would be years before I noticed everyone didn't read every word on the album covers every time they listened to an album). The Leader even let me pick an album to put on. I think I played it safe and grabbed Free's Fire and Water album, because everyone seemed to like that and it was one of my friend's older sister's albums. I was nervous that they wouldn't even let me play it, but one of the other guys seemed pretty happy that we were rocking a little harder, and the rest of the party was really party music of the late 70's, which kind of meant hard rock of the early 70's here in Ohio.

And that has next to nothing to do with Yessongs. Which is a really great yes album. You certainly don't need it, but they play the songs superbly and you get the entire Close to the Edge album, and a lot of Fragile and The Yes Album, too I thought it was a great buy, lemme tell ya! I had those albums by the time I got around to buying this copy, but like I said, Yes was my first favorite band, and I played their albums constantly. This one went through my horrid GE plastic record player, my slightly less horrid BSR changer, and then my first Dual, a 1019 which had seen better days! I got another Dual, a 1229, that was better, and that's probably when I bought this copy. I listened to this album a lot, and I remember when I figured out that during Rick Wakeman's solo that the chorus singing was actually a keyboard! Wow, that blew my mind back then. But there's just so much I love about this album, even though I played it to utter death.

Which reminds me, I was saying I remember getting it at Daisy Music Company. When I bought it, the guy hanging out at the record store (whom I figured must have been beyond cool to know the owner well enough to just stop in and talk) says, "Here's someone who just saw the movie last weekend." I had no idea there was a movie. I just wanted this giant collection of music. I'm halfway through it right now, and I think I'm gonna play the rest of it and read the book that comes with it, which is really just pictures if I recall correctly.

Deer Tick - War Elephant

I originally found out who Deer Tick was before this ever got pressed onto vinyl. I tried to order it, but it was one of those "gotta get it from the label" kind of things and it was only available on CD, so I decided to wait. I'm really glad I did, because in the mean time, the cover changed from a drawing of an armored elephant into a picture of girls in bikini's with guns! I think there's some guys on the cover too, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, neato vinyl fact: This is a three sided record! That's right, side four is just a cool picture, so don't try to play it. They don't make the drugs required to enjoy that kind of side anymore, so just stick to the first three and use the fourth side to show off pictures of your turntable on nerdy audiophile blogs.

Anyway, the music on the album is by a guy named John McCauley. He does almost everything by himself and I think that may kind of lend to this album being really well thought out and consistent from beginning to end. He doesn't have to argue with his bass player's wife about adding that turd of a song the bass player was scared to share with the band (for good reason) to the album. John knows what he wants this record to be and that's what it is, no more and no less.

What War Elephant is, is a smart, kinda sad, but mostly optimistic, mid fi Rock album. I love the sound of these tracks. They're just clean enough to make you feel like you aren't wasting your money on a real stereo (instead of a shitty iPod), but they're just dirty and gritty enough to back up McCauley's weary-beyond-his-years voice, and leave you very satisfied. There's plenty of acoustic guitars, violins and nice, meaty bass guitar to make any rocker happy. Although that happiness may be short lived, because McCauley's lyrics can be pretty sad, but he never seems entirely defeated. His love songs hold out some hope, but I think he's at the very least an agnostic when he's singing about God, so he doesn't seem to have many answers in that direction. Which is kind of refreshing because so many people these days seem to think God is on their side, and that's why they have bigger guns and more money than everyone else.

I don't know why radio stations don't play Deer Tick. I think this fits in great with Classic Rock like Neil Young or Bob Dylan. To me, everything that makes a great album is here. There's smart lyrics, greasy guitars, a feeling that this music was never new, it just always was, and it always will be. I can't imagine anyone that owns this album not still listening to it in 25 years.

It's got girls in bikini's with guns on the cover, too. Did I mention that?

Brownsville Station - A Night on the Town

Maybe it's because I'm from the Midwest, but I can really get behind a band like Brownsville Station. Not just because Cub Koda used to write a column in Goldmine called The Vinyl Junkie, but because he so obviously loved writing about the kind of music he loved to play. Brownsville Station was from Detroit, and they seemed influenced by Teenage Movies, Girls and just the thought of a good time. I think this was their second album, and it's pressed on a decent slab o' wax and sounds pretty good (it was recorded at Cleveland Recording). There's plenty of Midwestern, Detroit crunch in the guitars and Michael Lutz handles the vocals with authority.

You really can't ask a record that's been owned by at least two people before me to be any more awesome than A Night on the Town (Previous owners David Coy and D. Hustava both put their names inside the jacket and STILL managed to not own this anymore). This is chock full of guitar solo's, boogie and professing their love for Rock N' Roll. I was thinking of comparing this to Rod Stewart's A Night on the Town (because I'm sure this was Rod's influence), but it's pretty obvious that Rod missed the whole point of what a night on the town should really be all about, and Brownsville Station knows that it means letting it all hang out, kicking out jams if you got 'em and having fun.

I really love the total lack of pretension and self consciousness on this album. They don't care if Jonah's Here to Stay sounds like it should have come out in 1968 instead of 1972, or that it sounds like a Three Dog Night outtake because it's good. They get it back and make it their own, and prove that they aren't just a boogie band. They're the real deal and they deserved every second of fame and every penny Smokin' in the Boys Room finally netted them. Mr. Robert and Leavin' Here bring plenty of Rock attitude and guitars to the party, and while Brownsville Station doesn't reinvent anything here, they don't need to. They're too busy making sure their fans are having fun dancing and partying.

Flamin' Groovies - Teenage Head

When I was in high school, no one I knew had any idea who these guys were. For some reason, the first album of theirs I ever found was Bucketful of Brains, which makes most shitty bootlegs sound pretty okay. So I had a real hard time getting anyone to listen through the distortion, crowd noise and indifferent pressing to see how cool this band was. Eventually I found this, and I've pretty much claimed it to be The Best Album You Don't Have ever since. Sure, you may have it, and if you do, I'd have to guess you agree with me in regards to everyone else.

Simply put, this album is as good as gritty, bluesy rock ever gets. I don't know why it never got any airplay. You want great guitar playing? It's here. Cyril Jordan sounds like everything a top flight rock band in 1971 should have had to me. He plays great acoustic blues, and rocks and electric hard. What's not to like? Toss in Roy Loney's over-the-top vocals and I think you've really got something special. City Lights is hilarious, and Loney's dream of seeing the Empire State building because that's where King Kong climbed up is perfect. The title track is what every mother didn't want to hear their kid listening to in 1971 (or 1980, either). I think you should go buy it. Right now.