The Doors - Morrison Hotel

When I got to high school, I seemed to need to get a New Favorite Band, as it was pretty clear that Yes wasn’t quite going to cut it with the ladies.  Besides, I was trying to find something really cool.  The kind of band that when I was talking to people older than me would be impressed that I knew inside and out, and loved, and that people my age and younger would be impressed in my devotion to a sort of unheard (at least anymore) kind of band.  I don’t know why I decided The Doors would fit that bill, but until I really got into Punk, they bridged the gap between Yes and The Sex Pistols nicely for me.  I think this was the first album by them I bought, and Morrison Hotel is still probably what I consider to be their best album.

What ended up happening is that about the same time I got into The Doors, everyone my age started digging them.  So much so that by the time I was a senior, Danny Sugarman wrote a book about Jim Morrison and The Doors were actually selling more records than they ever had.  So for me, The Doors were like one of my first pet bands that went out and got uber popular.  I kind of dropped out of that fandom when I got married (pretty young by these days standards, but if it were 1929 I’d have had a long bachelorhood!).  Mostly because I slowly decided Jim was kind of an idiot, and I felt that way for a long time.

But time heals and all that.  So right now I’m listening to the same copy of Morrison Hotel I owned in high school, and it must have come into my collection after I bought my first Dual turntable, because it’s in great shape.  I’m listening to it the way I listened to most of my records at home, on headphones.  I used my speakers a lot too, but I loved my headphones.  They were some kind of Radio Shack branded things  made by Koss.  I had them for years and they were pretty good.  I just got a pair of Grado’s  and there’s probably no comparison, but I’ve got to say that the bite to Robbie Krieger’s guitar that just pierces through everything is really satisfying.  Especially at the moment.  I really didn’t listen to these guys anymore for years and years, but I never got rid of their records because I paid for them with my own money back when it was damned hard for me to come up with record money, and I hoped that some day (like today maybe) I’d sit down and listen to some Doors and hear some of what made me really think these guys were the shit.

I’ve really got to think a lot of it had to do with Robbie’s guitar.  Sure, I probably haven’t let Roadhouse Blues play all the way through on the radio in 20 years, but man, I just played it twice!  That guitar sounds like a switchblade through a leather jacket.  It’s just a great noise.  I think it’s part of being an American kid to feel that I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer is one of the most profound statements in Rock for at least a few years.  I guess we called this stuff “classic” for a reason back then.  Robbie kills it on Peace Frog, too.

Ray Manzarek has to get some credit, too.  I know, he can be hard to take in interviews these days (I’d rather hear him talk about X but he only talks about The Doors), but he sounds pretty cool on this record.  He plays nice blues piano on The Spy and he’s a little understated with that merry-go-round gimmick he could get going sometimes.  I tend to think that John Densmore was certainly as good a drummer as you were gonna find anywhere back then, and I really like how he holds Queen of the Highway together.

Now, the big star is always Jim Morrison with these guys, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that for a poet he was a pretty good rock ‘n roll singer.  I think a lot of people in that field are much better writers (at least of rock songs), and his poetry seems more than a bit pretentious to me (but seventeen year old me would have wanted to kick my ass for that).  But Jim had a great voice for a rock ‘n roll singer.  As Cheetah Chrome would have put it, he had balls.  I mean, Maggie M’Gill is a pretty pedestrian little blues shuffle, and Jim’s lyrics are mediocre at best, but I think it’s every bit as great a way to end the album as Roadhouse Blues was to open it.  It’s all Jim that propels it to something else, and I have got to give the guy credit for that.

My record is in nice shape, too.  It’s not an original pressing, it has a butterfly label instead of a red one but it does have the nice gatefold sleeve.  You can hear a little surface noise.  Maybe I need to clean it, but the jacket is pretty much perfect.  No seam splits, no mashed corners.  I did a good job taking care of this one since 1977 or 78!

Blacktop - I Got a Baaad Feeling About This

As we approach post number 50, which I had damned well better pick a decent record for, I’m  trying to think of what that record should be, and that means for sure, Mick Collins has to be in consideration.  I think Mick is one of the absolute best things about American music.  He’s got a guitar sound that is almost indescribable, and the guy can sing with as much soul and feeling as anyone, anywhere, anytime.  I’m not sure what he would consider his musical direction to be, because he’s all over the map stylistically, but his bands always have a style that they stay true to, but at the same time they don’t mind pushing envelopes.  Mick seems real good about letting the band sound like themselves, and I’d think that probably means he’s a pretty generous musician and it’s probably fun to play in his bands.

So today I’m gonna talk about Blacktop.  This is Mick’s band after The Gories, and no, I wasn’t anywhere near cool enough to know who they were while they were functioning as a unit.  I barely knew who The Gories were, and for me, the book is still out on them.  But Blacktop was awesome.  I mean, these guys were noisy and dark, with big, thumping drums and distorted, raw guitars.  Reading the liner notes of the cd version of I Got a Baaad Feelin’ About This also explains why Mick’s voice is as shredded as the guitars.  I’m pretty sure a lot of people won't  like Blacktop, but who cares?  I think it’s fantastic.  One of the albums I’m more than happy to have the original vinyl of as well as the cd with tons of bonus tracks.

The best thing about the record is that it’s one of those rare albums that are just cohesive and perfect in and of themselves.  You don’t need the cd if you have the vinyl, but it’s nice to have.  The best thing about the cd is they put the whole album in order and then they add everything else after, so you can listen to it the way it came out originally, just quit listening after track 14.  You’ll be good after that anyway, trust me.  Like I said, it’s kinda dark and it’s a record that demands your attention.  Not like it’s hard to listen to, but it’s hard to not listen to it.  You’ll pay attention.  You may get up and dance, but you’ll be involved because this is involving music.

Which kind of means that if you came here because you wanted to find what I have to say about Rod Stewart or Artful Dodger you may not like this at all.  Which is fine.  This is my record collection, and when push comes to shove, as much as I like things like BTO or David Bowie, I bet I listen to things like this more often.  It’s a shame drugs fucked this up (not Mick Collins, he’s not fucked up at all – in fact, I talked to him at a show and he’s a super nice guy), because I think Blacktop could have been something.  I’m not thinking commercial success, but something other than a band I have a record and cd of and wouldn’t ever get rid of either because I think they’re so unbelievably great.  So to me, this is one of the posts I think should get 1000 hits, but it won’t.  It will get 25 in two years, but that’s just the way it is.  Maybe if you haven’t heard them and you made your way to my little blog, you’ll check them out and you’ll like it as much as I do.

Now, my cd is the usual cd – silver and flat with terrific liner notes by Mick.  My record is cooler.  I found it at a record show, and the guy selling it didn’t know what it was, and he seemed pretty knowledgeable about more underground bands.  It was cheap, and it’s almost perfect in every way.  It was fun talking to the guy I bought it from.  I told him it was one of my all-time favorites, and it was Mick Collins.  He knew The Gories and The Dirtbombs but had no idea about Blacktop, and after I told him about it he said he wished he had listened to it.  I told him I was glad he didn’t, because I didn’t think he’d have sold it to me if he had!

Bachman - Turner Overdrive II

I’m never gonna apologize for my love of the first few Bachman – Turner Overdrive albums.  Never.  BTO was one of the first bands I ever loved, and Bachman – Turner Overdrive II may be one of the first albums I ever bought with my own money.  It may even be the very first.  I know I got it when it was still in the charts, so I was eleven.  I thought I was very sophisticated for having an album with songs like Welcome Home on it, which I thought the slow parts of were what Jazz would be like.  And I just knew that one day, I’d have a basement bar like my friend’s dad that had a real stereo had, and I’d sit around drinking brown liquor in a rocks glass and impressing my grown up friends by grown up me proudly proclaiming that, “I was into jazz at a young age.  Remember Welcome Home by BTO?  That’s what got me into jazz.”  Grown up me would then bask in the awesomeness that a statement like that was sure to bring.

So it turns out that’s still what I think jazz should be, and if it isn’t that, then it’s boring.  If that makes me boring, so be it.  I’m done trying to like music that’s boring to me.  I like Rock N’ Roll, I make no apologies and you can listen to all the noodly guitar playing and drums solo’s with brushes you want.  I want some amplification.  I don’t seem to care how dumb it is, and BTO is loud and dumb and I love it!  Besides, C. F. Turner has always seemed to me to be like the manliest man of all when it comes to singing.  Cheetah Chrome talked about the difference some guys singing have, and he just said that some guys have more balls in their singing, and all the guys lacking in that department can look at C. F. Turner and know that they’ll never measure up.  Is there anything more purely male than Let It Ride?  I don’t think so.  It starts off with those almost jangly guitars and some acceptable harmony singing, then the monster riff kicks in and C. F. lets it go,  While you been out runnin’ I been waitin’ half the night

Dude’s pissed.  You can tell.  He’s doing things worthwhile, and the old lady isn’t.

But this album just stuck in my ear all the time because all the riffs are huge, and the lyrics weren’t way over my head when I was a kid.  Hey, I wanted to ride my sting ray bike around and be able to sing the words with my friends and not feel stupid because I thought he was singing something totally different than he really was.  Thanks, C. F.  That big voice of yours cut through everything into my eleven year old brain, and it stuck good.  I knew back then that the whole thing with girls was gonna be a bitch, but I wouldn’t be alone.

Then there’s like the monster hit that Randy Bachman sings, Takin’ Care of Business, which was everywhere on the radio back in ’73.  Hell, it’s still on the radio all the time!  I always thought it was strange that the biggest BTO hits were Randy’s songs, because they were never the really heavy ones.  I think even my parents could stand the poppy Randy songs, but they were damned glad when I had this album I had a lowly GE plastic mono record player with a nickel on the tonearm to grind the needle into my records better.  You couldn't hear it more than two or three feet away, so it would be a few years before my parents found out what a woofer was.

So obviously, the copy I have now isn’t my original, but it’s not bad.  The original wouldn’t play, I’m sure.  But mine is pretty flat, quiet during the songs but a little noisy in between, and it’s got the old red label, just like mine did when I was a kid.  Now, should you run out and get this if you don’t have it?  Probably not.  But I wouldn’t get rid of it in a million years!

Cub Koda and The Points

Have you ever looked for a record for 30 years?  I have.  Sure, you can order anything you want on the internet.  But you always could just pick up the phone and call a few dealers in Goldmine and get anything you wanted.  Especially if you’re me and you’re really not looking for some gonzo rarity that’s gonna set you back a few hundred bucks.  Well anyway, one of those records I’ve been looking for since high school showed up at some pathetic excuse for a record store in Medina, Ohio the other day.  These dipshits actually have their records displayed to browse the way people store them in their homes.  I mean, you can’t flip through them, you have to try and read the spines like books because they put them on shelves, and they’re packed so tight, there’s no flipping whatsoever.  Assholes.

Anyway, I was waiting on a part and a customer for work, so I had a few minutes to kill and this was right around the corner.  I looked for like ten minutes and then was just going to leave when I noticed a very small section marked “Specialty Records.”  That used to be the euphemism for bootlegs, but these guys considered albums with all their inserts and booklets specialties, as well as colored vinyl.  So there were only about thirty records to sift through and I was already on the floor, so I figured I’d look.  One of the last records I saw was Cub Koda and The Points.

I about pissed my pants!  I heard his version of Cadillac Walk back in 1980 (I was still in school) and I never could find that record.  I don’t keep a real list, but I have a few things in my brain that I just always look for, and this was right there on my list.  I wanted a pink one, if possible (I think it’s the original, there seem to be lots of red ones on the internets), but I’d have bought the first decent one I came across.  Which was this pink one, with a cut corner just like the picture I found.

Anyway, you might think that I would be utterly disappointed that the record I wanted for 30 + years wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it would be, but you’d be wrong.  The amount of ass Cub kicks on this album looks like a Chuck Norris movie body count.  If you like your Rock N’ Roll straight with no chaser, this is the shit.  Cub doesn’t make any mistakes here.  There’s one ballad, Crazy People and it’s completely okay and holds its own against some killer Rock N’ Roll.  Welcome to My Job kills it.  The cover of Moon Martin’s Cadillac Walk stomps the original (which is killer).

Everything here is fantastic.  I know this is the kind of record I’ve built up in my head over these thirty years so it couldn’t possibly measure up, but this is absolutely the Rock N’ Roll record I knew Cub could make.  I mean, Brownsville Station brought the Rock in spades, but Cub’s enthusiasm and his mainline into the soul of Rock itself is what made them good.  If you find this, you should buy it.

The record itself is pink, midweight and flat as a republican’s head.  Sound quality is perfectly acceptable, but you won’t lose your shit over it.  It’s a Rock N’ Roll record, and that’s what it sounds like.  Mine has some weirdness to it.  There’s a small staple in the upper left hand corner.  There’s the cut corner on the right, and there’s some writing on the back that says WABX

next to Pound It Out and Jail Bait.  Did this copy come from WABX in Detroit?  I don’t know.  It has a Record Revolution sticker on it ($1.99 – are you kidding?  None of you bought this for that?  You’re crazy), and a weird gouge that looks like they were gonna cut the bottom right corner instead of the top.  I don’t care about the cover condition.  It obviously has a history, but I may be the only one that ever tossed it onto a turntable.  Which is cool by me.

Lydia Loveless - Indestructible Machine

I  try to write about albums I’m pretty familiar with, so I tend to put older stuff on here, but that’s not all I listen to.  I like a lot of new bands and I don’t understand what it is that makes people go from really caring about music and new music in particular, to either not caring and just switching to the country top 40 station and never buying any music again, or saying something dumb like, “There’s been no good music since 1982 (or 91, or 2002 or whatever).”  So Lydia Loveless’s Indestructible Machine is one of those newer records I didn’t think I’d talk about here for at least a year or two, if I liked it that much.

Well, I liked it way more than that much.  In fact, I think it’s one of my favorite albums I’ve ever heard.  I play it almost constantly weeks after having bought it, and I’ve bought new music since I got this, and I’ve barely listened to those albums.  Not because they’re disappointing (on the contrary, they seem terrific!), but because Indestructible Machine is just as good as it gets.  Like Punk?  It’s here.  Like real country?  It’s here.  Like rock n’ roll?  Lydia might have taken all the rock n’ roll and not left any for anyone else.  She just throws it all together with a cocky attitude and a killer band.What she’s got is an album that’s as addicting as crack.

Right off the bat the record kicks off at a breakneck pace with Bad Way to Go.  it’s a ripping song with plenty of electric guitar, stand up bass, banjo and lyrics of unrequited love.  But Lydia doesn’t pine, she calls the guy out on it and flat out calls him a pussy.  That’s what I like about her.  She’s funny, she’s blunt and she’s sure of herself.  I think the next song, Can’t Change Me sums up a lot of Lydia’s outlook on things in a song.  She’s happy who she is and she’s not changing for anyone, even Jesus.

She’s also got two slower songs on here, and I think those are where all the reviewers have decided she’s Loretta Lynn or Neko Case.  She can flat out sing, and Crazy is a terrific little love song that seems completely heartfelt and genuine.  I can fall for perceived sincerity in songs (it’s probably what works best on me, but I realize she’s a professional and sincerity is her job).  The other slower song, How Many Women really doesn’t do it for me.  It’s a fine performance all the way around, it just doesn’t interest me like some of the other songs.  I’ll say this, though – it’s a straight up real Country song of the sort you just don’t hear anymore.

I’m not usually a fan of the novelty song, but Steve Earle is one of the funniest songs I’ve heard in ages.  Steve should ask her to go on tour with him just so he can hear it every night.  I think my favorite song on the album is More Like Them.  I think it’s her strongest song lyrically, and I can really relate to a lot of it.  Which I suppose says a lot about me that maybe I should be working on, but towards the end of the song when she sings, If you think that I’m so fucking emotionally dense, it’s cuz I am, I know where she’s coming from.  One of the other lines I like in this song is really just because of her delivery.  When she sings, I know you want your money back, well I’m sorry but I still don’t have it she kind of quits singing the last part and just says, “I don’t have it.”  It’s kind of funny since it’s not my money.

The record is nice and flat and sounds really good.  Bloodshot is nice enough to include a download card, so I can listen to it in my car without having to record it myself.  My only complaint is that I’d have liked a lyric sheet.  This is one of the few times I’d actually like one, and that’s a pretty minor complaint in my book.  All said, if you’ve never heard this, you really should because it’s one of the most consistent and terrific records I’ve heard in years.

Nils Lofgren - Nils Lofgren

Here I am digging way back again.  I guess it’s to be expected.  I’ve been listening to records for a lot of years, so a lot of my records are old.  I still like them, though.  Every now and then I go through my records and I get rid of things I either can’t believe I ever bought in the first place, or that I just don’t seem to like anymore.  There’s also the handful of things that I bought because I thought they had a cool cover and they turned out to be crappy (though that’s been a great way to get records for me for the most part).  This is one I like a lot, but I’m sure it was ten years old by the time I got my hands on a copy.

I guess Nils Lofgren was really well known in the 70’s by rock critics and people like Neil Young.  Me, I didn’t know who he was.  I kind of knew who he was, because they used to play Goin’ Back on the radio now and then.  Now I’m  not usually one to remember pretty songs with nice piano melodies, but this one is a Goffin/King song, so it’s catchy as hell and if you hear it once, you’ll never forget it.  So I can remember this one being on the list of records I should buy that I keep in my head (those of you that actually write those lists down are probably more successful at finding what you’re looking for, but I do okay).  I think this is the kind of record that record stores would generally special order after 1977 or so.  I never remember seeing it on the shelves.  So the first one I saw was on cd.

There used to be a pretty cool store call Maximum Compact that had a pretty unbeatable rock music section.  I can remember kind of the early days of the cd, which was a time I bought cd’s and records, because not everything came out on cd.  I think it was around 1990, and Rykodisk reissued this one, and I was pretty happy to find it.  Rykodisk is a great label, and their cd’s sound terrific.  I bet this was one of the first 100 cd’s I bought.  I remember when they came out, they were like 20 bucks – twice the price of a record, if not more.  So it took awhile to build up a reasonably large collection of cd’s.

So I really didn’t know much about Nils except I heard that one song, and I knew he was supposed to be a killer guitar player.  Well, I liked the songs, and you can tell that when he feels like it, Nils can wail with the best of them, but on this album he lets the songs do the talking, and that’s probably why I like it so much.  It’s mainly mid tempo rockers, and that’s the stuff that just keeps me coming back for more so long as it doesn’t all sound the same.  I really like stuff like Back It Up, which is about a girl that needs to give Nils a little more respect, which is kind of the theme of the album, I suppose.  I’m not sure Nils was feeling confident around the ladies when he wrote this one.  Or I suppose it’s more likely he knew his audience of record collector geek types and wrote songs to try to bolster Geek Nation’s sagging confidence.  I mean, titles like Back It Up and If I  Say It, It’s So might be misogynistic in the hands of someone else, but Nils has such a laid back delivery that it sounds like a tough guy façade.  Especially when he gets to I Don’t Want to Know, which is like the ultimate doormat song.  The façade is easy to see through.

I really like this album, though.  Sure, it’s not all monster riffs and guitar pyrotechnics, but for me, Keith Don’t Go is the rock n roll love letter that every fanboy would have liked to have come up with back in the mid 70’s when Keith Richards was getting really lost in the drugs, and his music was kind of being affected by it.  I’ll defend a lot of  70’s Stones, but hey, after Exile on Main St. they did follow things up with Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock N’ Roll.  So I can see where Nils is coming from!

Side two kicks off with Nils crying in his beer a little with Can’t Buy a Break, which has a funny line about his cash not pulling him through.  There’s a great song about not selling out called Rock N Roll Crook that was one of those songs I used to hear late at night on college radio and never figured out where it came from.  I think my favorite song on side two, beside the closing Going Back is The Sun Hasn’t Set On This Boy Yet.  Just the first line resonated with me back in about 1990, when I decided to start going back to school so I could get my shit together and get a job I actually enjoyed rather than tolerated.  But I was totally on board as soon as I heard I dropped out of high school, it bored me to death.  Hey, I did, too.  I went back pretty quickly and finished, and I didn’t fight for humanity or sink in the sand, or play guitar, but I got it (I still get it, and I still don’t think the sun has set for me yet).

I guess this is one of those albums that just really resonates with me.  I think it’s funny that back when it came out no one liked it.  It didn’t chart for shit, but if you look at critical lists these days, it gets called one of the best albums of 1975.  That’s kind of cool, but I bet Nils would have liked it if people had noticed how good it was then.  Because now it’s just the record geeks that know how good it really is.  So it’s kind of a shame that no one paid attention back then.

I found a vinyl copy of this last year in Canada at Dr. Disk in Windsor.  It’s in terrific shape (hey, no one listened to it – even the people that bought it!), and it’s a pretty quiet pressing.  I’ve still got my Rykodisk cd, too.  There’s no bonus tracks or anything, but I bet I never get rid of it even though I have it on vinyl.  If you can scare up either one of those versions, I think you’ll be happy with the sound.  I think you’ll be happier with the music.  It’s just a damned good record.  With lot’s of melody to it.  Whatever happened to melody?  Remember when that was important in music?

David Werner - Whizz Kid

Man, is a decent copy of this hard to find!  At least around Cleveland and Pittsburgh, which may be the only places you're really ever gonna find more than one copy.  It's only available on vinyl, but I bought it on cd once.  I was pissed when I opened the package!  The store I bought it at (which still exists and has since given me a few good deals so they're in my good graces again) the guy that owned it used a pristine copy of this to make the cd, and a slightly less pristine copy of David Werner's self titled album.  I just got too excited and didn't notice it didn't have a record label.  Hell, I was in a store, why would they be ripping OOP lp's and making cd's?  No one else does that, so I figured I was safe.  It's a clean copy and it wasn't all that expensive as I recall.

But I still kept buying copies of this album, trying to find better vinyl than I had. A girl I worked with gave me hers, which was toast but I played it for years.  Then I found a pretty decent one for a buck, and traded my beater copy in.  It was okay, but there's some quiet songs here, so it's kind of nice to have it be a quiet surface.  I found another slight upgrade, and I think I switched covers, but then I found a really nice promo copy at Jerry's in Pittsburgh.  It was really cheap, and Jerry knows he can get decent money for a clean promo copy of this, but the promo stamp is really hard to see, because it's just indented into the back cover. The stamp doesn't use ink, so I don't think they noticed.  It's a Dynaflex record, so you never really know what you're gonna get.  But this one is really, really nice, and I think it's about time I was able to cross that one off my list of things I really wanted to have!

So you're probably wondering, "What the hell is he talking about, anyway?"

Well, David Werner was a guy that WMMS and the college stations around here actually played a bit in 1974.  In particular they played the song, The Ballad of Trixie Silver, and 12 year old me was just in love with that song (to steal a line from Paul W.)  It starts off with this pretty piano and slightly country rock guitar, and it's about some girl that sells boutique trash, and she says "Hey, you look a lot like a cowboy," and I still think Trixie Silver is is like a cross between Goldie Hawn in The Dutchess and the Dirtwater Fox (which came out in 76, I checked), and one of my friend Chris' older sister's friends.  In other words, Trixie Silver is really cool.  Amazingly, I still think she's the same and I still think she's cool.  People thought this was David Bowie, so it was hard to find it when I was that young, and I never really had a copy until I was in my 20's and had a job where a handful of us just talked about music all day anyway.  One of the women I worked next to heard me mention that song, and she just said, "God I used to love that album!  I think I still have it and you can have it if you want."  So that was my first copy.  And Trixie Silver was still a great song.

The rest of the album is a little hit or miss, but that's because it's a little more mellow than a lot of albums I really love.  I get in moods to listen to this and just play it all the time for a week or two.  It kicks off with a song called One More Wild Guitar, and it's not all that wild, but it's cool.  I think Werner could have made it bigger if he had come out a year or two earlier, but then maybe he was just a little more artistic than most bands from Cleveland, Pittsburgh or Detroit.  Werner can write songs with wonderful melodies, something Rock and Roll can use to strong advantage, but it doesn't really need it to be great.  This isn't really a record to dance to.  It's a record to listen to, and I think the world can use some more of those.  This is really great stuff, and if you've never heard it, I recommend it highly.  Give it a few listens and really give it a chance and it will pay off.  The production is top notch, and while I won't quite go out on the Audiophile Alert limb, it's a nice recording (when you can find a nice one) and I bet it won't cost you very much money.