Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Today's official album is really, really special. Screaming Lord Sutch might just be my spirit animal. He invented his own lordship, actively admitted to everyone that he sucked, specifically modeled his character after Screaming Jay Hawkins, and basically WAS Alice Cooper before Alice Cooper. In real life he created his own ridiculous political party and has the record for officially running for Parliament and losing over 40 times, just because he thought it was funny (eat your heart out Vermin Supreme). Sadly, he hanged himself in 1999, but 58 years of obviously untreated manic depression is a good run. This, according to England, is officially considered one of the worst albums ever recorded (it's not). Everyone who participated thought it was funny right up until he actually published it, and that's the real tragedy. The hurtest butt, of course, was Jimmy Page. You can flush his opinion down the loo as far as i care. I pointed this out in my diatribe about Micha...

Even if you've only been reading my posts with a wide toothed comb you'll know that 1) at some point i'll listen to a couple Motown artists, B) i'm still miles away from repeating a band, and Last) this coming Sunday will feature some sort of paul. But i bet you weren't expecting me to continue the baseball metaphor from yesterday and throw you a curve ball: a band who turned down Motown to sign with Capitol FOR LESS MONEY. I can't really decide if that was the right or wrong choice because there are persuasive arguments either way, but they definitely would have been a strange addition to the standard Motown roster... ... You know Bob Seger, but if you only know his radio hits from the 70s and 80s you're in for a real treat/horrible time depending on your tolerance for anti-commercial, underground Detroit rock-n-roll. I imagine that when the execs at Capitol heard the initial offering from The Bob Seger System they said "whaaaaa?" The gist o...

I've got at least one more double-header in me, but after that i don't know. Let's listen to Laura Nyro. "Who the hell is Laura Nyro?" you ask with an elevating tonal inflection. 50% of the reason she and David Geffen became millionaires in the first place, i answer deadpan. Besides selling a song to Peter, Paul, and Mary for $5,000 out of nowhere, then being talked out of auditioning for lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears (the position our old friend David Clayton Thomas ended up getting, remember) to form and later sell her 50/50 publishing company with said Geffen for $4+ million, her songs became staples of tons of bands (just go back through the liner notes of albums we already listened to, and realize that's a mere sample), and she's in both the songwriter and rock and roll halls of fame (though i suspect she had a few choice new york words for anyone who suggested she should be a celebrity). Jackson Browne was her boyfriend (not the other w...

Guess who got their name from a radio publicity stunt that became such commonplace schtick among DJs that the band eventually gave up and actually changed their name. Yes, no not Yes, The Guess Who, that's who. Holy hell, even i'm getting confused now. Anywho, they made a lot of music. Since i'm on a roll with this twofer thing, let's listen to The Guess Who's year of classic rock radio station fodder, 1970. That's the year they put out both American Woman and Share the Land, and Canada has every reason to be understatedly modest about them. A bit like Vanilla Fudge, they objectively rock, just not in a balls to your face kind of way (sorry, i might have mixed my metaphors a little too strong tonight). Up to this point they sort of struggled to keep members or tour properly, and after this Randy Bachman said "i really am going home" and did his own thing (but i don't have any BTO albums, so this is as randy as it gets, wink wink). Did you k...

I feel crummy today. It's probably just the combination of stress and allergies and cold weather. Let's do another pair of records. The Doors are explicitly "the doors of perception," so it's no surprise they are a radical, countercultural, philosophical behemoth of psychedelic blues rock. They are also one of the very few completely consistent bands i can think of: their entire discography is one gigantic album in my head. They are a lot like Creedence Clearwater Revival in that way; there's no question about whether it's The Doors or not, it is. Even if you wanted to argue that their debut album and their 5th album are stylistically/sonically different, you can't really say the band "evolved." It's all there from the start, and what you're really noticing is the evolution of recording techniques/equipment/personnel, and the inevitable smoothing out of everything by the chronological passage of time. Any particular song could h...

Let's hear the exact opposite of last night's album. Two friends who lived separate lives and careers, but met as young side men for different projects, and came together for brief moments of awesome. The last of these  moments is Jimmy Hendrix and Buddy Miles as 2/3 of Band of Gypsies. It's a double feature, and the encore is Buddy Miles' Them Changes, his first solo album right after. Band of Gypsies wasn't actually planned. The Experience had broken up, and 3 failed bands tried to record Hendrix's new material. All sorts of legal, contractual, and personal problems were affecting Jimi, and 2 nights at the Fillmore East with his actual friends Buddy Miles and Billy Cox being voluntary paid employees solved more than a couple of them. They rehearsed for a few months, but the concert itself was unplanned, improvised, and a little bit like 3 people winging it. In the end, 4 tracks credited to Hendrix and 2 credited to Miles became the live album Band of Gypsi...

Note to readers: it's currently Thanksgiving weekend, and i've lapsed in transferring these things over to the blog (but still posting daily to facebook). I'm going to just go back to binge posting these things in an attempt to catch up with myself. They are still in chronological order, even though i stopped documenting the actual day. I'm also going to stop searching out youtube links. You know how to find these things for yourself... ... and so, completely unintentionally, we round out week three with the last Simon and Garfunkel album: Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water. I honestly didn't notice it until i had actually decided to write about this album, but there's a paul on days 7, 14, and 21. My subconscious works overtime, and the fact that my dad passed away on a monday (labor day) never even crossed my mind. Morbid, but completely coincidental. It's also the last Simon and Garfunkel album, even though they didn't actually know it while it...

I somewhat casually threw out the idea that all albums are concept albums, and i think i need to flesh out what i'm really talking about. I'll use a record from my own collection (obviously i'm slowly adding all of these albums to "my" collection, but i assume you know the difference). The phrase "concept album" is popularly used to describe an album that intentionally tells a story or grapples with a main theme; like a novel, or an explicit series of paintings, or a film. I argue that every album has a concept, but that concept isn't necessarily the title, or artwork, or even the songs. The concept is what created the album in the first place, the collective idea that changed the internal desire to make and record music into a real physical object. All of my reviews have tried to get at that underlying concept in some way. The most basic and boring is obviously "here are some songs we recorded recently." Next would be live albums tha...

This evening, for your entertainment, i present a truly obscure album. Michael Brown was a pretty interesting dude. He's categorized as folk (what else can you call it i guess), but he was a cabaret composer through and through. He spent a year writing songs and music for every show put on by the first real American impresario, Julius Monk. He also produced in-house musicals for major corporations, and wrote children's books and all sorts of stuff. He and his wife Joy were the one's who gave Harper Lee a full year's salary to write whatever she wanted (To Kill A Mockingbird) as a Christmas present 'cause he happened to also be friends with Truman Capote. He's the kind of silly and saucy i like, and he had a genuine fascination with infamous historical figures. This album is heavily banjo oriented but it matches his persona perfectly. If nothing else, it's an interesting diversion from the dreary pre-winter Saturday happening outside right now. https:...

This might be the most complicated album review i've done because this is a complicated album. Let me get a few unorganized thoughts out there before i try to stitch them back together into some sort of coherent perspective. I hate this album as an album. Whether you agree with me or not, this is a terrible album. That's strange, because the majority of the songs are great. I completely separate an artist's personal life from their art: great people can make terrible music and terrible people can make amazing music and i don't think you necessarily have to be consistent in what you do or don't like. Music doesn't have morality or ethics or embarrassment or any of that stuff. People are the way they are because the world they live in forces them to behave in particular ways and "civilized society" is a compromise between individual desires and the general good. Ok, enough vagueness. There is an EP appropriately called "Thriller" hiding i...

After a couple false starts (albums i just wasn't in the mood to enjoy), i settled on the self titled sophomore album by The Band (their first album was born in Dylan's Basement Tapes) because i giggle a little when i think about "the brown album." Some people make the argument that this is actually a concept album, and i think i agree. It's quite a bit like Ladies of the Valley and Blues from Laurel Canyon in that the songs are about actual characters, but they are fictional. Mayall and Mitchell were writing about their impressions of real people and a real place. The Band though, is imagining a whole world, much the same way Fogerty was pretending that his native California was actually a swamp. Before the band became The Band they were literally "the band" that supported big name artists (and actually changed Bob Dylan's writing style by simply touring with and living near him), and i would argue that simply acknowledging that persona was the ...

If you don't like CCR then i can't help you. John Fogerty and friends are the blues-rock standard, and Green River is their best album. You're allowed to like other things, but you can't legitimately deny that every single song on this 9 track record is a hit. There isn't a single filler track on the whole album. It is its own "best of CCR" album. There's always been a lot of negative press about Fogerty's "writing" and ego, but there's a fundamental difference between "composing music" and "writing a song." Writing a song has very little to do with the specific notes a musician plays, and every great song is technically an improvised orchestration. You can play pretty much whatever you want so long as you are "playing the song." That's what jazz as a genre is, and that's what Creedence Clearwater Revival does with John Fogerty's songs. A different group of people would have played their p...

I went and opened my big mouth and said "soft rock." No, no, i said it. I'm a big boy. I can handle the first two Seals & Crofts albums back to back. Actually, this warner brothers repressing was a good thing. Those albums were both out of print, but the duo was mid career. If you're really investing in a group it makes sense to acquire their back catalog and make it available to new fans. It's also interesting because the first album is 90% Seals, while the second album is about 50/50, 60/40 at the worst. Obviously i'm a fan of the harder stuff, but you know me well enough by now to realize that i find immense pleasure in simply understanding something, making connections no one else has noticed, playing with ideas, and saying "i like it" to a group of people who thought i would hate it. If you thought The Moody Blues were squirrely, then James Seals is about to take you to school for show and tell. His songs are abstractly "folk ro...

Speaking of strange noises, let's listen to Every Good Boy Deserves Five Hundred Thousand Dollars, i mean Favour. Hello, Mellotron. I don't have any particular reason for choosing this album over the others in the collection, but it has some nice music on it. For me, the Moody Blues have always been ignorably good; they aren't as flashy as their contemporaries, but they don't really qualify as soft rock either. They aren't afraid to chase whatever proggy neo-classical daydream any band member had that day, but they never go completely free form and every song sounds well structured, however SQUIRREL! its sections or transitions appear. Did i mention the Mellotron? You know what it is? They're moody and they're blue, and i guess that's the kind of truth in advertising you don't get from most bands. Every song sounds like it's playing during the closing credits of a film you don't actually remember watching, but here you are in a thea...

What do Styx, Yes, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin all have in common? They share a common influence, of course. It might boggle your mind a little to think that Led Zeppelin had to "open" for another headliner before people really started to like them, but they paid their dues in the states by warming up the crowd for Vanilla Fudge. Known for taking popular songs and jamming/soloing all over them, and generally assumed to be managed by the mob, these guys don't suck. Don't get me wrong, they are weird and they won't hesitate to just stop mid-song for some nightmare inspired noise foolery, but they do objectively rock. Near the Beginning is actually their 4th album (so they're not exactly telling the truth, capiche?), but it continues my current infatuation with organ based rock, and contains yet another full-side piece called "Break Song" on Side B (recorded live in concert). If you like serious blues inspired guitar mangling, bassists who use f...

Tonight we're listening to Blows Against the Empire. If you're at all familiar with the complicated Jefferson [flying ship] history, this is the first mention of "Starship" but not actually the official band. It's various combinations of Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Santana, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash all playing Paul Kantner's concept album about stealing a spaceship and getting the hell off this jerk of a planet. Lyrically it's a multi-layered autobiographical science fiction metaphor about the band breaking up, paul and grace having a baby, and 60s/70s u.s. politics. Musically, it's a free form psychedelic folk-rock extravaganza that quite frankly makes radiohead's ok computer sound like fan art (there's either some definite influence or magical coincidence going on is all i'm saying). The mash up of folk, blues, and noise rock is pretty enjoyable in my book and there is some really nice instrumental noodling scattere...

I've teased it enough, tonight it's Iron Butterfly. Obviously Side B is the main attraction, but despite their somewhat lightweight lyrics the songs on Side A are pretty awesome. Nasty fuzz, overdriven organ, and some of the best bass lines ever, they flat out rock. Heavy , indeed. I haven't listened to the full Inna-Gadda-Da-Vita in ages, but 17 minutes goes by *snap* like that. We'll hear Iron Butterfly again and again and again whenever i finally get around to repeating bands (it'll be a while), but for now all you need to do is close your eyes, bang your head, and enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8a8cutYP7fpiZKjgdBrzVKXBdlYE6CWh Next

So this one time in 1968, some record execs thought "wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to make money off Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf again?" Obviously they would need some hip youngsters as the backup band, because the psychedelic scene was the thing... ... here's the debut album that won Rotary Connection those gigs. I think technically it's psychedelic soul, but i'd file it under the "what the hell am i listening to" section (a compliment in my book). Strings, brass, sitar, harp, choir, pretty sure there's both an actual theremin and a vocal imitation of a theremin in there, alongside the normal guitar/bass/drums. There's a spectacularly bizarre cover of just the chorus from "like a rolling stone" and had Issac Hayes considered the unique contributions an electric harpsichord could make when helping to write the eternal classic "soul man," well let's just say the world would be a completely differ...

 So many musicals. Let's listen to the original cast recording of Hair. Diane Keaton was in it. I know, i know, it's no secret that i've been sneaking in cover versions of it's most well known songs, so we might as well go back to the source. This musical was pretty radical for its time, and given our continued state of societal hypersensitivity you might find it equally uncomfortable. It's also not really a musical that works well in album form, but that's a silly thing to get hung up on. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmE-nbZ89BYZVdAmSxDyfh8yC8Eu2co4k Next

It's Streetnoise by Julie Driscoll/Brian Auger and the Trinity. 4 sides of 4 tracks from 4 people doing whatever they felt like doing. Driscoll's voice doesn't have a "timid" setting and it's hard to not notice the sheer badassery of Auger's organ playing. It's a complete fusion of rock, jazz, neo-modality, and a hint of gospel/funk, so much so that it's almost impossible to categorize what you're hearing or predict where it will go next. I've got more records from both artists, and now i won't hesitate to give them a spin as soon as they rise to the top of the stack. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94gOvpr5yt2b0B627Hef8kEp3Vrxl8zP Next

I've postponed it as long as possible, but you were going to find out about the original Mothers of Invention albums in my collection eventually, so let's listen to "We're only in it for the money." I must admit my special love of this particular album, because the whole reason it exists is to say "what's going on [in the world right now] is really stupid." The cover and gatefold photos are switched, because record labels are dumb (mine included). Zappa even called McCartney to ask permission, but lawyers and stuff. Zappa didn't like either end of the socio-political spectrum, and as i mentioned a few albums ago, today isn't any different than the late 60s (because we basically just ignored those actual problems for 50 years). Go ahead, try to not find it relevant.... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mZIwX2v46fKfMEDrJoQ3wbSu8Ila4Ciks Next

Stop whatever you're doing and go listen to this album. The whole thing. Don't argue, just do it. If you haven't noticed, my dad liked FULL bands (strings, horns, winds, keyboards, guitars, drums/percussion), and there's plenty more in our future. Sure, this is straight up 70s Canadian pop/jazz-rock, but it's soooo gooood! How are they not better known? Every arrangement was done by the band themselves, instead of by some becubicled "producer." They list their "road crew" with the band members for crying out loud. Top notch. https://youtu.be/TonuaFpUAkI Next

I could play anything from the numerous bands and artists i've mentioned already, but i'm having more fun exploring things i've never heard. I think it's completely fair to call Beacon Street Union obscure. They only made 3 albums and this is the second. I don't pretend to know why they reused the same dead clown as The Doors did a year before, or why they do an elvis impersonation in the middle of Side A, but I do know that everything else is pretty great. The guitar doodles on "a not very august afternoon" are really enjoyable, and they use their orchestral backing in creative ways. I don't have anything to suggest for comparison, they are pretty unique like most of the psychedelic bands of the time. I wouldn't call them groundbreaking or essential, but they make some pretty good music for zoning out and wobbling your head back and forth. I was a little apprehensive about the 16-minute "baby please don't go," and while it...

I'm just beginning to sort the stacks into crates, and this is the very loosely defined pile of "rock" (prog, psych, blues, folk, etc.) Not counting the ones we already heard. There's only one New Wave album in the stack, and all things considered, of course it is. Men at Work's debut album was the first Australian album to really get popular in America, and how could it not?; you can be mad at me for saying it, but it's a better album than a few by The Cars or The Police. Colin Hay is definitely on par with Ric Ocasek in both the songwriting and quirky personality departments. And don't be fooled, he's got some Andy Summers level guitar chops to boot. Go give it a listen. You'll feel pretty good afterward. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxdssidp8egCD16B5bCb4aF9iYJ0nxRce Next

Ok, I've decided. It's Blood, Sweat & Tears (with Satie, without an oxford comma). Why, because Jim Fielder was a Mother of Invention before he bled, sweat, and cried through the constant cycle of lead singer auditions the band went through until he quit to do session work. BS&T is their sophomore album, mostly written by Al Kooper, but realized by David Clayton-Thomas (and you know the first 2 songs of Side B even if you didn't know it was them). BS&T is a lot like Joni Mitchell , in that you either like them or you don't because they are exactly what they want to be: a rock solid band (pun intended) with a brass/wind section that didn't really care about genres or image or any of that stuff. They made whatever music came out of their instruments and it was pretty enjoyable. If you're a real Grammy buff, you'll know exactly what record i'm going to listen to next. Go ahead, try to guess without looking it up... [No good full album li...

I promised you Canned Heat, and I never renege. Here's Hallelujah, the album they released just before Woodstock. They were the wacky, wiley, white boys playing blues every night on Sunset Boulevard. Somebody narced on us and we wound up in jail? Sell some song rights for bail money. Zappa kicked you out for smoking pot? Ok, come play with us! Lease our own club and invite everybody to play? That's a great idea! Mayall wasn't lying, "The Bear" and crew were pretty much the center of attention and hanging out with them was seemingly an instant career boost in the late 60s. Bob Hite and Alan Wilson trade off vocal duties, and they couldn't be more different: Hite is pure rowdy roadhouse, but Wilson lives over in Grateful Dead territory. This is not a concept album, it's just good old fashioned workhorse blues-rock of it's day. There's some really raunchy guitar work, screaming harmonica, studio experimentation, and even some upright bass....

It occured to me today that it would be interesting to compare Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon with John Mayall's Blues from Laurel Canyon. They are both about the same part of LA at pretty much the same time. Mitchell is of course the local, speaking about characters from a folk perspective, while Mayall is the outsider on vacation singing the blues. Her songs are about relationships, his the real result of a breakup (disbanding the Bluesbreakers). Hers are minimal, voice and self accompaniment, his is a newly formed 4-piece band. Hers is happening in the present, his a recollection. Both however share a sense of lonliness in a place so full of people. A feeling that something is missing, that people walk in and out of your life because we ARE essentially alone. My dad loved John Mayall (he told me so, and there's a whole fistful of records here to prove it), and well into Side B i'm starting to get why. There's nothing stale or reworked or trite abou...

There are so many ways i could go about choosing the next record in a collection this big and varied, so many paths i could travel, but i've never heard Pharoah Sanders. This is essentially African free jazz (lots of traditional African instruments), and i love that the album notes tell you which musicians are playing on the left and right channels. And let me tell you, that central solo on Hum-Allah... is the craziest thing i've heard by anyone who isn't john zorn (who incidentally was only 13 at the time of this recording). Sun in Aquarius Part 1 is a beautiful chaos that gives way to some equally beautiful nonsense inside a piano, then builds back to a relentless cacophony of everything before the break (no surprise i love it). Part 2 picks back up just before another wicked banshee tirade and somehow seamlessly morphs back to straight jazz. I really love the use of voice as a ululating instrument, full solo halfway through Side B, with an imitative bass duet ...

Let's go in a completely different direction and listen to Joni Mitchell's Ladies Of The Canyon (that's the one with "big yellow taxi" and "woodstock"). I don't really have anything specific to say about her. Maybe that's because she is an expert songwriter; her songs are perfectly constructed pop-folk. You might not like certain aspects of her vocal stylings, or her tendency to blatantly ignore important punctuation in her vocal phrasing, or the way she avoids resolving leading tones directly, but it's impossible to pretend that she does it by accident: she knows exactly what she's doing and you either like it or you don't. This album also has some of the coolest sounding vocal overdubs. I'm not a fan of alternating guitar and piano accompaniment (a similar criticism i had for Fever Tree), because it makes the song order sound perfunctory and directionless, but since this album is clearly a collection of vignettes rather ...

Speaking of Steppenwolf, let's listen to Monster (a good version of the negative comments i had about Fever Tree ). I dare you to find a more relevant statement about our present day country than the title track suite of 3 connected songs, AND THAT WAS 50 YEARS AGO! 3 albums in one night? Yeah, i've had a rough day. I also love this album, and it's one that i constantly listened to on my dad's gigantic record cabinet (it's got the skips to prove it). That guitar solo on Draft Resister, the spastic piano/guitar duet that is Fag, and real female background singers! Every track is an anthem for the people, a reminder that whatever narrative you've been fed is simply untrue, a plea for basic human compassion and consideration, and the cover art is sideways!!! This is an album worth having in your head while going to sleep. Goodnight everybody. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ogdCG3tAWhe1yGPcNYD6EH1xSDiHl6f Next

My original plan was to just do one album each night (unless the first one was somehow unsatisfying), but tonight's choice of Tarkus was based on cool cover art for an album i've never heard before, and since there's 2 rum and coke's for every can i'm more than happy to say this is an awesome cover for a band i never even knew existed (which for me is saying something). I hope i'm not disappointed... ... and the answer is "yes and no." The band is quite good and i want to hear their other 3 albums, but this album shows some definite disadvantages holding them back. In no particular order: - They can't seem to decide if they are pop-folk or blues-rock, which wouldn't be bad if they were recognizably the same band in both genres. - the band is primarily a front for the producers/songwriters, and you can tell. There's a little something that just comes across as manufactured in every track. Like, a lyric that doesn't sound right,...

So, i know ABOUT Emmerson, Lake, & Palmer, but i've only ever heard a handful of tracks. Let's change that. Here's Tarkus, the sophomore album that nearly drove them apart, and took a long time to win over it's audience. But look at that album art! Side A is a 7-part suite about semi-mythical creatures portrayed in the titles and artwork, the protagonist gets stabbed in the eye and runs off into the water; it's everything i've ever tried to construct, and i haven't even heard it before tonight. It is prog personified, with wacky organs and synths, badass guitar solos, and occasional singing. Side B is "some other stuff," and that's cool too.   I generally sneer when people say things like "why didn't i find this sooner?", but for me it's because i listen to anything all the time, i'll never get to hear everything but i try to make a dent. This is a great album, and it's earned a spot on my "list...

Tonight we're listening to A Salty Dog, by Procol Harum. It's got folk and blues and strings and horns and one of the most red-velvet cake lead guitar tones i've ever heard. I mean it, you can practically taste the cream cheese frosting on Robin Trower's guitar doodles. I'm partial to Side B, but it's an enjoyable listen from start to finish. Go check it out while i decide what to throw at you tomorrow night.... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL288273C9F30ED2E1 Next

I just couldn't send you off to beddy-bye with plastic ono nightmares (i'm not a complete monster ), so here's a palette cleanser. The first Beach Boys album, Surfin' Safari. Tomorrow we'll head back to prog-rock town, but no hints or spoilers. I'll also tell you that i'm using a very cheap plastic usb turntable called the ion iTTUSB. The turntable may be cheap, but it has an adjustable counterweight and the phono preamp and DAC (digital/analog converter) on it are pretty decent. It really is running straight from usb into my computer and out to my headphones with perfect RIAA eq and no artifacts or strangely distorted effects. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k9NH-1fGU3Ntgay8wbLIiuYbxC5MKlJXM Next

That fourth album by Spirit (a band we'll hear at least a couple more times wink, wink) was such a treat that we must unfortunately suffer today. Side A is pretty much a bunch of talented musicians playing for fun with no real rehearsal time. Side B however, is a special treat. Remember, the only rule on this bus is listen to the whole album. Hating it is just as good as loving it, and if you want Lennon and Clapton jamming together, you're gonna get Ono bleating like a goat having an epileptic seizure "all over you" for an encore. Why? Because Johnny Boy didn't give a damn whether you liked it or not. Now sit down, shut up, and listen to the first ever performance by The Plastic Ono Band - Live Peace in Toronto 1969. If those poor unsuspecting Canadians could handle it and clap, so can you. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n6Ph4bQCC3-onqc1KN8Ub6_WFbwWBNib4 I promise the next one will be less mentally taxing. Next

I debated heavily how to start our journey. Should we go right for the good stuff? Or, should we kick it off with pure shock? Nah, let's start with the mildly obscure 4th album by my favorite psych-rock band, Spirit. Hey, if Hendrix gave you the nickname "Randy California" you can't be too bad. I'll put a youtube link below, and i think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Interesting fact, the track list on the back of the jacket is completely out of order. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLfLWygNyBDN-rOPYVTAPvIpL9zy0HGoF Go give it a listen and tell me what you think. Next

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho...