Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

And the winner of the most insane thing to listen to after 7 Megadeth albums in two days goes to.....the soundtrack to Grease! I'm partial to the theory that the whole thing is the death dream Sandy has as she's drowning in the ocean, but i'm nothing if not morbid for the sake of humor. If i were a character from Grease, i'd be Rizzo. Hello, Frankie Valli. Grease is the word? Sure, it does have a meaning, but i though the bird was the word. Did Barry Gibb write this? Yes, yes he did. What are we doing here? Throwing away conventionality by listening to the Grease soundtrack after Megadeth. I already explained that. Nearly drowned? It's a good theory. As far as movie musicals go it's pretty darned popular. I'm still not known for agreeing with Roger Ebert, so i find it incredibly confusing why he gave it a 3 out of 4 but called it average and plastic. I don't share Gene Shallot's dude crush on John Travolta either. If brain tumors could act

Frankie Avalon said hooker, so i guess it's time for another round of "soundtrack for a movie that sounds like an hour and a half of my brain i'm glad isn't filled with scenes from..." Never On Sunday. Lots of academy award nominations and stuff. Pygmalion but from a hooker with a heart of gold perspective? No thanks. Quick wikinopsis: american guy falls for greek prostitute, convinces her to not be a prostitute, she finds out it was a ploy by Noface the pimp 'cause she's a bad example for all the other prostitutes what with her independence and personal rather than subservient choices and goes back to being the role model for all those young entrepreneurial prostitutes who don't need a pimp, and Homer says i guess i was wrong, yay Greek prostitutes. I'm sure i'm missing some subtleties or nuance or something, but still no thanks. I'm gonna just pretend like it's an enthnomusicological survey of Greek popular music written by Mano

And let's not forget the covers and soundtrack songs they made along the way. Rest in peace, Megadeth's ascension from gutter rats to manicured gutter rats with keys to the executive washroom. Next

Countdown to Extinction might be the perfect album in every respect. That is to say that every aspect of the band, the business, the zeitgeist, everything just synced up and out popped an amazing album. Everybody wrote a song on this album. Dave never wanted to be a one man show, he just couldn't convince anyone to get professional treatment for their addictions (he tried because that's what he wished James and Lars would have done). Now he had a stable lineup! They practiced, they tweaked and reworked songs to fit everybody's different playing styles, they played basketball in between takes (the whole thing was complicated by the 6pm curfew during the Rodney King riots, but that didn't hamper the inspiration too much). Their chosen producer actually participated in the process this time, contributing ideas on how to make it even better. Whaaaa? In many ways it's the obvious Megadeth response to the Black Album. Oh you're going for mass appeal by doing an

You're going to look at me weird, but Youthanasia is the most beautiful sounding album i can think of. It's also the actual act of dying. Or rather, it's the end of the transformation from child to Vic Rattlehead, the not at all subtle doppelganger of Uncle Sam. Whether he intended to or not, he was writing a story through Megadeth albums, and Youthanasia was the end of the story. It had to be absolutely perfect, completely democratic, and actually be the metaphorical death of Megadeth. It manifested itself as a kind of tug of war in the studio. Dave was meticulously anal retentive about the technical/musical stuff, but he demanded that the other three guys be equal and fight with him. It confused the hell out of everybody, because they didn't really get it. Dave didn't want to be the egomaniacal owner of the band, but that's what the world turned him into. It's time for that character to die and be another useless corporate drone for our war machine o

Finally, we get to the classic albums with the classic lineup. That's not to disparage the before and after, it's just to say that for most people, this is Megadeth. May all your nuclear weapons rust in peace. This album came from a bumper sticker quote. Is it better than Peace Sells...? I don't know. Peace Sells is an underground/fringe album, Rust in Peace is a mainstream metal album. Thematically, i think they are the same. Every Megadeth album is the same, the songwriting just gets better (up to a very specific point when it's very definitely over). Dave Mustaine is an Eddie Van Halen type riff guy. He just wanted to write songs and play lead guitar, but he couldn't find a frontman so he became his own. Every incarnation of the band picks cool riffs and songs from his hours of tape recordings and they make an album. It's not rocket science, they play stuff they thought was cool and Dave's lyrics range from standard escapist magic/sorcery stuff, to

Hey Dave, who should we get to play now that we've fired our heroin junkie drummer and guitarist? Gee i don't know Dave, i met these two heroin junkies who can play for us. Why didn't you say so, Dave? Geez, we could have already hired and fired them by now. But seriously, they didn't even make it all the way through the tour for So Far, So Good, So What before they had to go home for more drugs, or less drugs, or who knows. Dave Mustaine is not good at keeping track of what he ate for breakfast yesterday, how could he possibly keep track of all the blurry faces he fired in the 80s. It's not like he himself was sober for 10 consecutive minutes during the whole decade. It does sound much better than the previous two, but sadly the songs just aren't as good. Topic wise it's great, nuclear war, depression, drunk driving, censorship, and revisionist history, but it trades some speed for heaviness and that's a loss in my book. Not a bad album at all, ju

First off, Gar and Chris weren't fired for "substance abuse issues." Yes, Dave and Dave were really frustrated that they were too high to show up for recording sessions because Dave and Dave were homeless, but they were fired because they stole the band's gear and fenced it so they could buy more heroin. Chris eventually got clean and played on another Megadeth album that i don't care about, but Gar died. Peace Sells, but Who's Buying? 1986 is the year of the Challenger explosion and the Iran-Contra Affair. It's also the year that Dave Mustaine said, look, this supposed "american dream" thing is pretty much dead. Anyone with eyes can see that the hardest working people aren't getting anywhere because they are paying corporate america to let them live in peace. You can't succeed by working hard and earning it, you succeed when someone finds a way to profit from your success. Said another way, make me money and i'll let you keep a l

You know what bothers me the most? In 1995 Lee Hazlewood actually won. He quoted Melanie (look what they done to my song, ma) and complained that Megadeth's version of These Boots Are Made for Walkin' was vile and horrible. Yes, that was the point. The only character being defamed was Dave himself. Killing Is My Business... is the result of Dave being sent home mid-tour for being the worst drug abusing alcoholic in a band comprising drug abusing alcoholics. His sales pitch was whatever Metallica does, i'm gonna do it louder/faster/nastier 'cause i wrote most of Kill 'Em All and i want revenge. Capitol Records said ok, here's $8000. They immediately spend half that on drugs, fired their producer, asked for another $4000 and produced it themselves. I don't think it sounds terrible at all. It sounds like early thrash metal. Dave is the bad guy. Vic Rattlehead, the victim of anonymous torture, is their new mascot. It's not satanic because this is just the

Ok. Megadeth time. I only care about their first 7 albums, my Megadeth stops at Hidden Treasures. The reason is complicated. I've mentioned it before, but 1995 is kind of a tipping point in my mind. It wasn't that grunge killed mainstream music, or that the internet was starting to make an impact, or even that major labels started wildly flailing around and preventing bands from getting popular without their support. What really happened is that my generation finally said "screw it." We were tired of even trying to succeed in the world of business. Pick a person who "achieved success" and i'll point to the guy or gal he ripped off to achieve it. Corporate America reached a tipping point where the wealthiest Americans said to themselves "it's more important to profit from pumping disposable garbage into the world and use that money to feel happy and shoot tigers and live by the lake than it is to care about the working class and their fami

I once said that "best of" lists are dumb. "Worst of" lists are much better, and i'll explain my reasons. 1) it eliminates albums you just hated on instinct or genres you intentionally avoid, 2) it forces you to evaluate a body of work you have internalized (that is, you know something about), and 3) it forces you to consider your own opinion without pitting you against the nebulous idea of other peoples' preferences. I posed the question "what's the worst album you've listened to all the way through?"  And i got some great answers, mostly things that were really disappointing. I have a worst album. It's the worst album in the bottle of beef collection. I actually bought it BECAUSE it is terrible. It has no redeeming qualities that i can think of, and that is really saying something. Let's look at some of the official worst albums based on critical reviews (but only the ones i've actually heard, so no kevin federline, or o

You know what you need? Light Pop-jazz harp and orchestra. Robert Maxwell is famous for writing Ebb Tide, Shangi-la (Jackie Gleason's theme song), and making the harp not quite so weird of a solo instrument. Ok, maybe it's still weird to hear a 1963 pop harp album, but who else is gonna tell you about it? No one. Just me. I think Robert Maxwell had the right approach. He was on TV a lot from what i've read. Remember when Zappa went on TV and played an upside down bicycle? I think he was just tapping into the camp and humor of it all, and this album has it too. It's campy. In a great way.  It's not a joke, there's some incredible orchestration and playing, but it's fun, it's lighthearted, it's bubbly, it's entertaining, at least what i think of as being entertaining in the early 60s. There's lot's of playlists of his stuff on youtube. Go find some and have a smirk. You won't regret it. Next

The winner of tonight's random bandcamp search is Dan Vapid and the Cheats. Not gonna lie, i was expecting complete garbage when i searched for "tweezers." I don't have any idea what i actually did, but this was the 4th thing that popped up, and since i have the attention span of a squirrel, let's go for it. Random is random, even when you get it wrong. Not joking, this is the 6th thing i've wanted to buy on vinyl today that's been completely sold out on payday. That blows because holy shit this is good. It's punk, old school punk. 50s/60s rock and roll with massive distortion and super catchy music and melodies. Now, Screeching Weasel is one of those bands that everyone has played in at one time or another. That's a Chicago thing for sure. Dan Vapid is tied for most prominent not a weasel with Dan Panic at 6 albums each, but Mike Dirnt is probably their most famous bass fill in. Not important. I can't repeat it enough, this is awesome. G

You ever read any Poe? No, but i like her 2nd album a lot. Wanna hear an hour and 15 minutes of existential torture that'll have you running for you safe room but too afraid to walk down the unlit hallway to get there? Here's Haunted, the companion to her brother Mark's book House of Leaves. What do you mean you haven't read it? Were you raised in a forest talking to tay-tays? It's Jodie Foster movies, hurrah! Useless Jodie Foster, as my dad used to call her. That's not fair, she was a legitimate multi-lingual child prodigy and deserved to go to Yale. Silence the bleating. Put on your hazmat suit, be the brave one, and make contact with your local purveyor of ergodic literature. I'll run up to the attic and fetch my copy while i wait for you... ... suitably terrified? Let's go. The samples on this album are mostly from Daddy Danielewski's audio diaries that they found after he died. We start off with the creepiest answering machine message

Which brings us to The Endless River. It's a beautiful piece of music. After The Division Bell, they did have Andy Jackson edit the leftovers into a large ambient work called The Big Spliff, but they never released it. Finally in 2012, David and Nick revisited the material and decided to actually do it. It's a lot of things, and you can go read all the various things said about it, but everybody gets it wrong in some way. David Gilmour always said and believed that Pink Floyd didn't belong to any person. Pink Floyd was the group of people making the album, in the flesh or in spirit, part of the band or a hired hand. He kept reluctantly inheriting more and more of it, until he was finally done. This is David Gilmour's last Pink Floyd album, and fittingly it's an instrumental collage with a final song written by his wife. Pink Floyd played music. It's his way of saying hello to all the people who want to listen, and goodbye to all the people who helped make

I don't think anyone would really argue when i say The Darkside of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall are the 3 best Pink Floyd albums. The Division Bell, however, is my favorite by miles and miles. The main theme is communication, but it's really about making choices. The Division Bell tolls for the call to vote. Yea, or nay. We've come full circle. Build the wall, or tear it down. Rise to the challenge, or run and hide. Make a product, or record your friends playing hours and hours of music (who cares if they are technically in the band or not?) and see what develops. It's the last Pink Floyd album. They planned to use leftovers from it for other things, but it wasn't until 6 years after Wright died that they finally made The Endless River. Everybody got songwriter credits (making the various producers and agents mad), because everyone contributed to writing the album in their own way. David says, no more cocaine for me, thanks. It's Gilmour

I don't care if A Momentary Lapse of Reason is basically a Gilmour solo album made by his backup band. I don't care that it's undeniably 80s apartment rock. I don't care that it's just songs. I don't care that it's more like a midi programmed performance by the animatronic Chuck E Cheese band than a Pink Floyd album. I care that it's Pink Floyd again. Richard is there. He only added some background chord filler, and he's not an official corporate member of Pink Floyd, but $11,000 a week is a ridiculous amount of money, so who cares? We think of these bands as just some dudes making music, but they aren't. They are executives with a board of directors, sub-managers, staff, phone calls, and business meetings (probably less formal than where you work, but identical in the legal sense). Roger quit the band, and he didn't want to hang out any more, but he still has his share of the business and he's "Director of Pink Floyd Music.&qu

Everybody knows The Wall. Waters hated playing arenas so much that he said out loud he wished he could build a wall between the band and the audience. They hired Bob Ezrin to help flesh out the story and the rest is history. There's a lot of important background stuff going on with this album. Roger had two ideas, one became his solo album the other became The Wall. That's the simple part. The hard part is that Pink Floyd had a history of handing their money to real sleeze balls. They needed to make a big album to have money because NWG was about to lose all their money, but leave the band with the 80+% tax liability for earning it. Hard to pay a couple million in taxes when your actual bank balance is zero. Finally, Gilmour pulled the plug and became the band's financial manager himself. Every check from here on out has David Gilmour's signature at the bottom. End of discussion. He didn't particularly want to adult that day, but he was the only one who was go

... and then out of nowhere, Margaret Thatcher cared very much about Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands. So much so, she waged her own private undeclared war. In the end, i think everybody agreed to just pretend like they own it, but don't actually kill each other any more. Pink Floyd was easier, since they didn't file their paperwork properly from the get go, the court said figure it out yourselves, ya whiny children. Gilmour got Pink Floyd and Waters got The Wall. Roger eventually apologized for being a jerk. Score one for due process diplomacy. What happened after The Wall boils down to this. Richard was out of the picture completely (don't worry, he'll be back), and Nick didn't care anymore. David and Roger, sittin' on a couch. Roger's plan was to use tracks that didn't actually make it onto The Wall for the soundtrack to the movie version of The Wall. Then along comes Maggie. Scrap that, let's make an album about the Falkland

I mentioned that Pink Floyd was a twisting knobs in the studio kind of band. Now that their original deal with EMI is over, i can tell you that their deal was a lower percentage of sales in return for unlimited studio time. I can also tell you that that's not a deal: it's the made up thing that Pink Floyd thought was a good trade off. In reality, from a bookkeeping standpoint, the band pays for everything. A record deal has always been, and will always be, a corporation buying a band's music outright and using it to turn their own profit. When that profit is really good, they let you keep the change. Pink Floyd got to keep millions off the trillions of dollars their music actually generated. We can argue about expenses and legal fees and what have you, but Jason Newstead can tell you that once he passed his probationary period, they let him in on a little secret called money management (not of the venture capital variety) and he never had to work another day in his life b

Greatest things of all time lists are dumb. But, Dark Side of the Moon certainly belongs on all of them. This is the first Waters album. By that i mean, he came up with the idea that all the songs should be written about a single idea: things that make us mad. This was an album written to be performed as their next tour, assembled on the road by playing it bits at a time. They bought some new gear (9 tons worth to be exact), moved rehearsals from a Rolling Stones warehouse to the Rainbow Theater, and premiered the whole thing for the press a year before it was released. Believe it or not, recording all those clocks was an Alan Parsons project. I don't care who you are, that's funny right there (Larry the Cable Guy, who'd have guessed that was rattling around in my lunatic of a brain?). It's about conflict. It's extravagant, but it's concise. There's no beating around the bush, there's no speculation about what kind of furry animal is bustling in th

It can be really confusing to read about these middle albums, everyone talking from their own perspective of having lived it as though each album is a separate thing, a project they sat down and hashed out. We, however, are watching them live it, and it's a completely different thing. Waters' Pink Floyd is tangible because we can see him take control, get angry at everyone else for making it harder to create, and finally explode. The other three think they're still just a band, but Roger is writing about his real life internal existential crisis. We're talking about an 11 year chunk of time where they have enough money to not care about having to make money. Roger's goal wasn't to become a millionaire and get drunk by the pool every day, but it also wasn't to grind and vacation, grind and stare at hotel walls for 6 months, watch label execs cash in on his hard work and say things like "gravy train" and "fame and fortune." He wanted to b

Obscured By Clouds. Obscured by Pink Floyd is more like it. After More, Barbet Schroeder made sure that they would make the soundtrack for whatever film he made next. They said "yeah, sure" and went on tour and started writing Dark Side of the Moon, then had to find some time to stop off in Paris on the way to and from Japan to actually do it. Same game plan: time out scenes from the film with a stopwatch, make some music, force David Gilmour to write a song 'cause he'll have to do it full time after Roger Waters' over inflated ego explodes after a few more albums, and he needs all the practice he can get, end up making fully formed tracks, getting mad at the film company and changing the name (forcing the film company to add a subtitle to the film because the direct connection to Pink Floyd was important), then finally getting back to missing Syd. It's an often overlooked album. Partly that's the nature of the project itself. It comes across as some t

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. But bottle, where does the connection to Coil fit in? Pink Floyd's album covers were designed by the art collective Hipgnosis. Remember that weird zydeco infused thing by Hapshash and the Colored Coat. Yeah, a design house focused on album art. A group of artists making steady money from labels by doing real design work (something major corporations take away by monopolizing the production process and preventing artists from freely working with other artists). Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson himself didn't make any Pink Floyd covers that i know of, but he was a member of that collective. He was also in Throbbing Gristle then formed Coil with his superfan turned boyfriend, John Balance. It's a small world after all. Somewhere in the middle of the Atom Heart Mother tour they realized they had absolutely no idea what they should do next. So, they experimented with various ways to was

So we can get back up and do it all over again. Where do we even start with this thing. I mean, it's got a standard album structure for the time, the recording process was a nightmare, they hated making Ummagumma so much that they did it again and wouldn't let Gilmour leave until he wrote his song for the b-side, the titles are from the same type of tangential metaphors i use even though Pink Floyd isn't my inspiration for doing it. I guess we just pick some of those things apart and don't make any effort to steer the ship at all. Concerts and soundtrack contributions, snippets of melodies from jamming live, new studio equipment that they weren't allowed to run spliced tape through. Waters and Mason had to record the whole 23 minute suite in one go from memory because they couldn't read music (that'll be important), then head back out to play shows while Ron Geesin tried to make up an orchestra/choir piece above it while leaving space for Gilmour and W

Ummagumma isn't a Pink Floyd album either? I'm so confused. I'm not confused at all. I told you that Richard Wright was not a front man. There's no Richard Wright's Pink Floyd. He's not the team leader or manager or anything, he was just the only one with ideas that they could actually accomplish at the time. It turned out that halfway through he regretted making it a no-cooperation endeavor just like the other three didn't enjoy it, but for good or bad it's their 4th album. Pink Floyd makes concept albums. Real concept albums. The act of making the album is explicitly their conception of what album they should make. Some of them are movies, some of them are statements, this one is a double album about 4 guys living two simultaneous double lives as performers, recording artists, members of a famous band, and people with real lives that may or may not cross over those boundaries. And the soundtrack for Gigi is relevant. It is, go look up the plot of

I took a pill in Ibiza. Thanks, but no thanks, Mike Posner. More is a fascinating album. So fascinating, I'm actually not sure if i'll even talk about the music in this essay. It's the soundtrack to More, the film about Ibiza's heroin crisis. The prop drugs in the film are real, cause why buy stuff when the cast and crew can just empty their pockets? The soundtrack is not real, or is real but isn't a standard soundtrack. It's a Pink Floyd album made by watching scenes from the movie and timing them with a stopwatch so they would fit into the scenes of the movie like they were just playing in real life. Pink Floyd didn't have sync studio money, and Barbet Schroeder wanted contemporary European music playing when a character flipped on a radio, or a tv, or put on a record, or sat in an office with loudspeakers, or whatever. So, it's a newly Syd Barrett-less Pink Floyd album inspired by Barbet Schroeder's images of 60s narcotic induced free love on

Nick Mason says A Saucerful of Secrets is his favorite album; a cross fade from Syd to David and the birth of the collective Pink Floyd we're about to explore. I don't disagree. Critics say it's not as good as their first album, they call it mediocre. They are wrong. If you thought Pink Floyd was Syd Barrett, then this won't sound the way you want it to sound. If you wanted a magic folk fairytale, you'll be unhappy. But, if you want a highly refined and balanced album of psychedelic rock, not too silly not too dark and depressing, made by a group of kids trying to figure out how to work together in the midst of falling apart, it's pretty awesome. Some of them thought they should stick to the 3 minute make us a little money pop song format, some said slow build rock symphony skip a few decades to post-rock soundscape-ville was the way to go, some said build it like a house, some said let it happen the way it wants to happen, all of them contributed and th

Oh, by the way, tonight i begin listening to Pink Floyd's Oh, By The Way. It's their 2007 boxed set, so it doesn't have The Endless River. Maybe i'll listen to that one at the end, maybe i won't. Depends on how the story unfolds. The real question is do i point you to the three albums i've already listened to and discussed? Do i pretend they never happened? Do i revise them to better suit my current place in the universe? Perhaps i simply give you the option to read them if you wish. I like that. https://albumsforeternity.blogspot.com/2020/04/pink-floyd-dark-side-of-moon.html?m=1 That link will take you to my Dark Side Of The Moon essay, and you can click "next" to read about the tan album, then "next" again to read my long ago thoughts on Syd Barret's Pink Floyd. Or not. I'm not the boss of anybody. We're currently in the midst of the second wave of a coronavirus pandemic, there's a heavy duty fascist uprising takin

You look tired. Working all day out in it. Well, come in and have a seat. I cleared off a chair for you, the fan is whirring away. I promised you libations, commestibles, a revitalizing tonic or two. I promised you Refreshments. Never reneged before, and i don't plan to start now. Like i've said so many times, there ain't no morals to these stories at all. The good guys and the bad guys really don't work past noon around here. We can have some fun pretending, or you can chase me with a baseball bat and put me out of my misery. It's not a bottle and there's nothing sour to bite on, but i'll tip this fizzy-fuzzy rum and coke and say cheers. Here's to life. No? Well you know what they say: you can lead a horse to water.... Kidding. Don't mind me, i really am carefree. What should we listen to tomorrow? Which one's Pink?