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.

Grand Funk - We're an American Band

I think this is the first time I ever saw a record on colored vinyl.  I was 11 and it was summer time and you know they played We’re an American Band at the Longbrooke pool where I could pretty much always be found, even though I didn’t live there, on an almost constant basis.  I think I had a Berea News paper route so I finally had some money and had started buying albums.  My friend Stub (that’s what we called him) had just bought it and we listened to it on his dad’s old AR mono rig.  That thing was hi as fi could go, if you asked me.  Anyway, Stub had just got it and was telling me it was a gold record.  I probably called him a liar!  Everyone knew records were black!

It was such a cool thing, though!  That record came in a shiny gold laminate kind of cover and it came with four stickers that looked sort of like the label, a finger pointing right at you in a very 70’s bit of design style.  I had to have one.  Even if I only liked one song on the album I had to have it.  So I collected a few houses and went to either Daisy Music or The Shoppe (maybe even Grant’s?) and bought myself a copy.  I couldn’t wait to get home and check it out.

When I go there, I went in my room and opened it up, sliding out the cool stickers and immediately sticking one on the first of four stupid places to waste my stickers on (I don’t know what it was, probably my brother).  Then I slid the record out, and…and…THE DAMNED THING WAS BLACK VINYL!  Man, was I pissed!  I remember talking to some record store owner shortly thereafter (probably the Daisy Music guy, he taught me a lot about how to behave in a record store and such) and that’s when I found out what limited editions were.  It took me decades to come across one that looked like Stub’s, but I finally found one, with all four stickers.  I think it ended up being free because I bought a stack of used records all at once and  I got a break on the price at Jerry’s in Pittsburgh.  This one plays nicely, but it has some crackles in between songs I could do without but it’s better than it would have been if I had gotten a gold one in 73, that’s for sure!

So as far as the music goes, I still think it’s a pretty terrific album.  I think Don Brewer and Mark Farner both have great voices for big, lunkheaded 70’s Rawk, and they wrote some catchy stuff that a kid could always get behind.  Mom and dad hated it, and this album has Craig Frost adding some half decent keyboards so even my inner Yes fan was treated to some cool solo’s on songs like Black Licorice.  Which back then I thought was probably kind of a socially unacceptable thing, but I wasn’t sure why.

I think Creepin’ kind of helped shape a lot of my views about music at that time.  I didn’t mind long songs, in fact I think I kind of liked them better than short radio hits.  It was really cool to hear WMMS or WNCR play Creepin’ or the even better side two opener The Railroad late at night when I was supposed to be asleep.  Those songs sounded like what I thought older kids would listen to.  At least the ones that I thought would be cool.  I may have been wrong.  I don’t know.  I know it seemed like no one read Creem anymore when I got older, and Rolling Stone hated these guys, so I was probably wrong.  I know that when Punk was blowing my mind I still liked Grand Funk, and the people I met that liked Punk hated Grand Funk.  So I don’t know where they really stand on the Rock N’ Roll scrapheap, but I think they were pretty swell.

I always thought Walk Like a Man should have been the second single from this album.  It may have been for all I know, but I always thought Don Brewer just sang his ass off on that one.  He sounds like a MAN.  No prissy little rocker, he sounded like a dude that your old man would call mister.  At least he did to me.

So my vinyl could be a little less noisy, but it’s not irritating and I’m really glad to have a gold one, finally.  I’m also just going to leave the stickers be this time.  Now that I think about it, those things used to be everywhere.  They were on school lockers, inside bathroom stalls, on stop signs and metal doors – they were ubiquitous.  I bet if I think about it, I’ll notice one, or at least its remnants, somewhere around here before too long.  I actually got to see these guys eventually, and they were great.

Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells a Story

Ya know, Rod Stewart had a real, real good run going in the beginning of the 70’s.  I know he became the butt of some crude jokes when he “went Disco” and he never really recovered from that stuff with the cool kids.  Maybe it was because he was just this close to being mentioned in the same breaths as The Stones, Beatles and Dylan, and he just started kind of losing direction shortly after, and then instead of just losing direction the dude jumped off a cliff into a mountain of money.

I’m trying to think of when I first got this album.  I think it was the late 80’s, on cd.  I had friends that had this, and I had some other Rod Stewart albums, but it’s not like they didn’t play damn near the whole thing on Cleveland’s radio stations.  I think I found my vinyl copy of this in the 90’s at a flea market or a used record store that’s long gone.  I remember just grabbing it because it was cheap, and then one day putting it on the old B&O and wondering what the hell happened between the vinyl version and the cd.  The vinyl I have is a red label Mercury on Energy Crisis weight vinyl, but man, does it sound great!

I’m a sucker for a great, dry drum sound.  I like it when drums sound just like they do if you’re in someone’s basement and they’re banging away right in front of you.  Mickey Waller is a shambling mess that sounds like he’s gonna lose the beat at any second, but he never quite does and he gives Rod and the band a terrific, wobbly foundation that reminds me of a getting a good drunk on and being a little unsteady, but happy and more in control that people suspect.  A tricky balancing act indeed, but everything just works perfectly here.

What I find interesting is that the best songs here are written or co written by Stewart, but most of the songs are Stewart’s interpretations of songs other people wrote.  It seems kind of strange, especially coming from an era where it was really expected of people to write their own songs.  Maybe Rod didn’t have much in his tank, but three of his songs here are three of his all time best.  Sure, if you’re my age you can live without hearing Maggie May again, but the way it jumps off the record makes it sound as fresh as it did coming out of mom’s AM radio in her ’65 Valiant (sure, it sounded like crap but I was 8 and it was good enough for me!).  Then there’s the “wow, that’s (high school) deep” of Mandolin Wind and the “man, that sounds like a (college aged) great trip” of the title track.  That’s three songs that have held up for over forty years and they still, even after all these years, sound like they were recorded just yesterday.  That’s craftsmanship, and maybe Rod couldn’t do it prolifically, but when he was good he made it count.  Rod’s true claim to fame may be that he can be a brilliant interpreter, but at least here the three very best songs were his.

As far as the record goes, I wish the cover weren’t perforated.  Mine is still attached, but barely.  It’s still in good enough shape and I’m not looking for another one, but still…The record itself is almost as flexible as a Dynaflex disc, but it sounds terrific.  The blend of the acoustic guitars and drums with electric bass and guitars has such an open quality that it’s like you can reach out and touch the space between the instruments.  The whole thing sounds like the band is in the room with you, with a beautiful stereo separation that presents a soundstage producers don’t seem interested in presenting anymore.  Maybe it’s because everyone listens to music with earbuds or near field in front of their computers, but when I hear something like this I have to think that we aren’t exactly hearing recorded music as well as it can be done these days, and I’m not bitching about compression and loudness.

Usually when I decide to give something an Audiophile Alert I check online afterwards to see if I’m alone in this opinion.  It turns out that there are a lot of people that prefer the red label Mercury pressings to Mobile Fidelity vinyl and gold cd’s.  So you should be able to find the best sounding copies of this album easily for less than ten bucks!

Sweet - Desolation Boulevard

I was still in elementary school when this record came out and took the airwaves by storm.  Man, we thought Ballroom Blitz was beyond cool.  I remember hearing the album in my friend's sister's room while that song was still super new, and I immediately thought Fox on the Run was the best song on the album.  Hey, I was 12.  When I finally got my own copy of this LP (which is long gone, eaten by cheap record players and youth's grubby hands), my favorite song turned into Sweet F.A. and it still is today, for several reasons.

First of all, it's easily the best song on the album, even if lyrically it's by turns repulsive or downright stupid.  It's also the first song my mom completely freaked out about.  We used to have a little Webcor stereo that my dad ordered from a catalog (I loved my dad but good sound didn't mean anything to him so he ordered a stereo because it looked like it would do what he wanted it to, not because it sounded great).  The Webcor sat out in the family room and even with it's minuscule speakers I could turn it up way louder than my plastic GE record player.  I think mom tolerated side one.  She probably correctly figured I'd just think A.C.D.C. was the usual rock lyrics where they couldn't keep things like tense and subject straight so the words would rhyme and that I didn't have any idea what the subject was really about.  But when I flipped the record over and played Sweet F.A. and If she don't spread I'm gonna bust her head came blasting out of the Webcor, that was it for Sweet!  I think the only way I kept it was I told her it was someone else's record so she couldn't throw it away, and then I listened to it in my room after that.  I think this was the first record I had that had this power.  So even today I remember that day every time I hear that song.

I still think the first side is better than the second side (even though mine is on a CD now).  probably because the guys that wrote most of Suzi Quatro's best songs, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapmann were behind the songs on side one of Desolation Boulevard.  I never cared much for Sweet after this album.  Not because I'm some big Glam Rocker, but because the band's in house songwriting sounds too much like watered down Queen, or maybe 10cc with a distortion pedal.  I think everything good they had came out on side two of this album, and it slowly loses its luster.  It's not like it slowly turns to crap, but Chinn and Chapmann had a great formula and I like their big, dumb riffs.

I don't have a lot of albums left from when I was 12.  Probably because my tastes have changed drastically (hopefully), but there's a handful of them.  I think the ones I still like aren't considered necessary or particularly cool these days, but I don't care.  I like this stuff.  I know it's kinda dumb and it's definitely made for a teenage audience that doesn't even exist anymore, but it makes me happy.  How can it not?  It's like a Snickers bar, all sweet and crunchy.  And do you know how big a Snickers was in 1974?  Way bigger than now, that's for sure!

The Bloody Hollies - If Footmen Tire You

OK, so I just bought this on vinyl yesterday.  It's really pretty, too.  Super shiny cover (watch out on the dance floor at a Bloody Hollies show - if you fall they'll pummel you!), and a super flat red record with custom labels.  Now you may ask, "I thought he didn't want to talk new stuff?" and you'd be right.  But I had an old blog and I've had this on CD since 2005 and it was my album of the year when I did that sort of thing.  I found it at a place in Cleveland called The Loop.  The Loop is a coffee shop that sells records and CD's.  I'm guessing they do most of their business in coffee, but I found a few things I wanted.  I've been meaning to go there for ages and I finally did yesterday.  I wasn't blown away by the place, but the records are fairly graded. There's some post it notes on a lot of the records describing what they are, and they're well worth reading.  One thing I didn't get - there's stickers on a lot of new records that say, "Don't break Seal or you Bought It!" on them.  Do their regulars think they can just open up records and pop them on the listening station to see if they like the music first?  Really?  Why would people think that they could open a new record? They sell new and used stuff and I found this in the used section.  I grabbed it right away, because it looks like it may never have been played and it's about the best Punk album to come out in the past decade.

Is that a lot of praise?  I hope so.  The Bloody Hollies are the three hardest hitting riff drivers around.  Their music is like getting punched in the gut, and getting up and taking it again because it was so much fun the first time.  Singer/guitar player Wesley Doyle may have the kind of voice that takes some getting used to, but this is one of those albums I've put on without telling anyone what it was just to see their reaction, and while it's divisive, if you fall on the side that likes loud, fast and hard, you'll probably love this album.

No songs on the album are over 3:30, so The Bloody Hollies don't fuck around building things up.  They get right to it, find the riff, and beat it into submission.  They sing about girls and being pissed off.  The lyrics won't be mistaken for Bob Dylan, but they won't be mistaken for Gene Simmons, either.  They fit the songs and Wesley's voice will make up for anything lacking lyrically.  He means what he's saying.  The main thing here is to Rock and to Rock Hard.

All the songs are top notch.  Their first album, Fire at Will is good, but this album is great.  Maybe it's just having Jim Diamond at the controls , but these guys just fattened everything up and made it just perfect.  Gasoline is the kind of song that will get you a ticket when you're driving on a sunny day.  The drums and bass are just relentless and the guitar stabs in and out of the beat and just slashes everything in sight.  I'd have to wonder if they can even play another song after they play that one.  The song that closes out side one, right after Gasoline, is Right Between the Eyes, and that's exactly where it hits ya!

Side two is more of the same hard hitting sonic assaults, like Raised By Wolves and Mind Control.  There are no slow songs or ballads, just slashing guitars, pounding drums and bass and shredded vocal cords.  I'm not exactly sure what more you could ask out of an album.  I'm sure this isn't for everyone, but I think it's pretty much as good as it gets.

Middle Brother

I don't usually write about something I've only had a few weeks.  Sure, I did it with Wild Flag, but man, that's just such a great album!  I suppose every now and then I get a bug up my ass to show that I don't just sit around and listen to ancient records.  The other thing besides me not having this for very long is that John McCauley is in Deer Tick, and I already wrote about one of their albums on here and I made a pledge to myself to try my damnedest not to put a second article (I mean, they aren't exactly reviews, are they?) about a band until I hit 50 articles.  Then all bets are off.  I can just go on about whatever I want.  I kind of do that anyway, but there's actually a little (very little) thought behind this!

Middle Brother is the aforementioned McCauley of Deer Tick, with Matt Vasquez of Delta Spirit and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes.  Now I've never really checked out Delta Spirit or Dawes, but based on how much I seem to really love this album, I'm going to have to correct that oversight.  Especially when it comes to Delta Spirit.  Matt Vasquez really knocked me out with his songs on here.  I still think I like McCauley's songs best, but I'm a big fan of Deer Tick so I'm nice and comfortable with John's approach.  McCauley's songs are the most ramshackle and sloppy, and that's what I like.  And before you get pissy and try to argue with me, I think it takes great craftsmanship to write and play Rock N' Roll that sounds like it's the first time a band ever played a song, but it never falls apart.  I think that's a lot more work than a lot of people give it credit for.

Vasquez has written what's got to be my all time favorite song in the world right about now.  I could listen to Blue Eyes all day.  The kind of country kind of Stonesy sound is built on an earwig of a riff, and where I'm usually completely happy just to have one or two good lines in a song, Vasquez just seems to have a wonderful way of looking at things.  A line from the opening verse is what grabbed me right away,

A soft kiss is a hard goodbye
Been knocked out since yesterday

I think that's just great and it really made me pay attention.  My favorite part of the song is a complete jumble that I really had to read to get straight because it's convoluted, but it really works, at least for me.


Told myself that you're the one
And I told myself I could get you back
When I came back you still weren't mine
Then I left again and you still weren't mine
I'm back again so just be mine
I am so tired of runnin'


That really doesn't look like it would work, but it does for me.

Then they toss Portland in, and I'm just on board with these guys all the way.  I always want to think that an odd Replacements song like that is kind of a wink to fans of that horribly overlooked group (sort of like a band playing a Big Star song years ago), but the more I think about it, the more I think it's nice to hear any Replacements songs covered.  Middle Brother does a great job with Portland, and it's a nice way to close the first side.

So I'm really glad I picked this up finally last week.  I've been meaning to grab it for ages, but this has been one of those records that's at the store when there's a couple of "Oh man, I've been looking for this!" records and before I knew it almost a whole year went by since it was released!  And now I'm gushing about it here after just a week.  So is it possible that I'll get bored with it?  Nah, I don't think so.  I have a feeling that Taylor Goldsmith's songs will all be the kind that grow on me, and McCauley's songs are his usual top notch stuff.  So I'm pretty comfortable saying that if I had bought this last year, and I bothered to do a Top Ten List, this would have been in my top five.  If you haven't checked this out yet, you really should, especially if you're one of those "there hasn't been any good music since blah, blah, blah" people.