When he stepped onstage at the storied Regal Theater on Chicago’s Southside in November 1964, B.B. King had 30 R&B hits but had barely creased the pop charts. Recorded that night, It was B.B King’s first live album would become an entry point for many white listeners, and blues aficionados still speak of it with awe — Eric Clapton was rumored to spin Live at the Regal to prep for his shows. Newcomers encountered an urbane but never slick professional, backed by a killer horn section, who belted each number with class and grit, all the better to showcase the jazzy yet terse yet economical solos he coaxed from his beloved black Gibson, “Lucille.” His set here begins, as it did those days, with “Everyday I Have the Blues” — not a lament, but the boast of a touring workhorse who performed more than 300 shows each year.
B.B. King is not only a timeless singer and guitarist, he’s also a natural-born entertainer, and on Live at the Regal the listener is treated to an exhibition of all three of his talents. Over percolating horn hits and rolling shuffles, King treats an enthusiastic audience (at some points, they shriek after he delivers each line) to a collection of some of his greatest hits. The backing band is razor-sharp, picking up the leader’s cues with almost telepathic accuracy. King’s voice is rarely in this fine of form, shifting effortlessly between his falsetto and his regular range, hitting the microphone hard for gritty emphasis and backing off in moments of almost intimate tenderness. Nowhere is this more evident than at the climax of “How Blue Can You Get,” where the Chicago venue threatens to explode at King’s prompting. Of course, the master’s guitar is all over this record, and his playing here is among the best in his long career. Displaying a jazz sensibility, King’s lines are sophisticated without losing their grit. More than anything else, Live at the Regal is a textbook example of how to set up a live performance. Talking to the crowd, setting up the tunes with a vignette, King is the consummate entertainer. Live at the Regal is an absolutely necessary acquisition for fans of B.B. King or the blues music in general. A high point, perhaps even the high point, for uptown blues.
Grant McLennan Australian alternative singer-songwriter and guitarist. He co-founded the Go-Betweens with Robert Forster in Brisbane in 1977. In addition to his work with the Go-Betweens (1977–89, 2000–06) he released four solo albums, Watershed (1991), Fireboy (1992), Horsebreaker Star (1994) and In Your Bright Ray (1997). He also undertook side-projects and collaborations with other artists. McLennan received a number of accolades recognising his achievements and contributions as songwriter and lyricist.
In 1977 Grant McLennan met Robert Forster at university. Forster encouraged him to learn bass guitar and to form an alternative rock band, Along with Robert Forster, Grant McLennan became one half of the song-writing team behind The Go-Betweens. While The Go-Betweens were on hiatus during the 1990s, Grant McLennan embarked on a solo career, releasing four solo albums, two albums with The Church’s Steve Kilbey, and one album with the Far Out Corporation. McLennan’s songs which evoke the impressions and imagery of the regional background of his childhood include “Cattle and Cane”,“Unkind and Unwise”, “Dusty in Here” (about his father), “Boundary Rider” and “Bye Bye Pride”.
I’m not going to pretend that McLennan’s 1990s work out-shines his songs in the 1980s with The Go-Betweens. It’s certainly not uncommon for pop musicians to do their best writing in their twenties, and there was a sense of McLennan struggling to find his solo identity in the decade. After balancing perfectly with the acerbic, angular Forster in The Go-Betweens, he could be a little overwhelmingly saccharine by himself, and he flirted awkwardly with the mainstream on his first two solo records.
Robert Forster and Grant McLennan play an acoustic version of ‘Cattle & Cane’ and talk about writing a song about growing up in Queensland while living in London. ‘
But 1994’s countrified double album “Horsebreaker Star” is a masterclass of song-writing, even if it tends to blend together, and McLennan is among my favourite song-writers, like a comforting blanket with his warm voice and melodic charm. McLennan didn’t get the chance to add to his solo catalogue after The Go-Betweens’ reunion in the 2000s, dying prematurely from a heart attack in 2006, but here are some of his highlights from his 1990s:
“Providence” (Jack Frost) In 1990 Grant McLennan on lead vocals, bass guitar, lead guitar and keyboards formed a rock band, Jack Frost, in Sydney with the Church’s front man, Steve Kilbey on lead vocals, bass guitar, lead guitar, keyboards and drums.The group released a self-titled album in 1991 and the pair resumed the collaboration in 1995 for a second album, Snow Job. McLennan’s collaboration with The Church’s Steve Kilbey was recorded in 2 weeks, with the pair playing most of the instruments themselves. McLennan’s work with Kilbey is moodier than his other solo work.
“Surround Me” He released his debut solo album, Watershed, under the name G. W. McLennan in 1991, which was produced by Dave Dobbyn on Mushroom Records’ White Records label. For its United Kingdom version it appeared on Beggars Banquet. It was an “ambitious and highly personalised collection of songs charted McLennan’s emotions in the wake of The Go-Betweens’ break-up. [it] revealed McLennan to be, in turns, the introspective singer/songwriter or the carefree and gregarious performer. McLennan “isn’t the most talented singer; his voice is a bit plain, and his range somewhat limited. He isn’t the most gifted guitarist his playing sometimes amounts to basic acoustic strums. He is, however, a truly exceptional artist who, in the spirit of Lloyd Cole, crafts moments of brilliance to fit his limitations the mainstream sound works for this hooky slice of pop/rock, and its big chorus.
In November 1992 McLennan issued his second album, Fireboy, which was produced by Dobbyn again, compared to his previous one and found it was “an even more melancholy set of songs that boasted fuller (though never obtrusive) arrangements, it “finds the musician in excellent form, with a baker’s dozen worth of songs that won’t challenge preconceptions, but do make for a great listen all around” with “sweetly sparkling, sometimes barbed, numbers. During 1993 he toured Australia with a backing band comprising Michael Barclay on drums, Pedro Bull on keyboards (both ex-ex-Paul Kelly and the Messengers), Maurice Frawley on guitar (ex-Paul Kelly and the Dots) and Phil Kakulas on bass guitar (ex-Blackeyed Susans) One track “Fingers” Another song from Fireboy, a moody piano ballad that missed the cut for Intermission, the excellent compilation that McLennan released in tandem with Robert Forster, documenting their respective careers in the 1990s.
McLennan’s third album, Horsebreaker Star, appeared in December 1994 as a double-CD. It was recorded in Athens, Georgia with American session musicians and was produced by John Keane it was McLennan’s most consistently catchy solo album providing 30 snapshots of a resigned romantic while unrolling tune after sweet, simple-seeming tune.its wide-screen outlook, the album shifted from country rock to bright acoustic pop with a great deal of optimism and passion. It was “more of a country/Southern rock bent…his ear for focused, sharp lyrical portraits of life and love, paired with his ever-striking crisp singing style, continues to lead the way. Opener Simone and Perry sets the tone nicely, similar to previous character sketches like The Go-Betweens’ ‘Right Here’.
In September of 1997 McLennan released his fourth solo album, In Your Bright Ray, with Wayne Connolly producing (You Am I, Bluebottle Kiss, Underground Lovers) returns him to his more well-trodden ground, [and] is as warm and soft as a cake out of the oven, a just-washed blanket, and an Eskimo coat. In 1998 he collaborated with Powderfinger’s Ian Haug on guitar in Far Out Corporation.In Your Bright Ray
The title track from McLennan’s final solo album is beautiful and restrained, a sunny, thoughtful piece of pop.
McLennan died of a heart attack at the age of 48 and was survived by his fiancée, Emma Pursey.
“Wow, man, you can even dance to that!” said Bob Dylan when he heard the Byrds‘ heavily harmonized, electric twelve-string treatments of his material. The Byrds‘ tender-but-tough debut defined folk rock with Pete Seeger and Dylan covers, Los Angeles studio savvy and punchy, ringing guitars. Its influence on generations of “jangly” rock and roll makes it one of the Sixties most visionary albums and while the Dylan songs got most of the ink, their originals (“I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better”) were just as great.
Released in 1965, this highly influential folk-rock album was The Byrd’s first LP, and it remains my personal favourite next to the Notorious Byrd Brothers . Though, of course, not every song on it was actually released as a single, every one of them is a hit. This debut album features Jim (Roger) McGuinn, Gene Clark, David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke. The line-up of the Byrds changed regularly but some of these musicians also achieved success with other groups, too numerous to mention here. The style is generally described as folk-rock, but there is more to it than that.
The title track of this album was their first and biggest hit, going all the way to number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Byrds heavily covered tracks which were written by Bob Dylan throughout their recording career (in which they were able to bring their own special brand of harmony to one of the greatest song writing talents of all time), and four of them appear on here, including ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, which both the British and American public took to the top of the charts, and the follow-up single: ‘All I Really Want to Do’, which peaked at no.4. It’s success was made all the more respectable when you consider that it was having to compete against another version by an up and coming girl singer known as Cher.
For me though, the album’s real highlight is an original: ‘I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better’, written by the band’s founding member Gene Clark, and one of The Byrd’s greatest songs.
“Where have all sensations gone?” Neko Case asked on this Vancouver band’s debut. A lot of indie-rockers were wondering the same thing during the music’s late-Nineties nadir. The New Porno’s gave the scene a jolt of energy and sorely missed fun. Burt Bacharach fan Carl Newman, Bowie obsessive Dan Bejar and alt-country barnburner Case didn’t have much in common on paper but on songs like “Letter From An Occupant” and the title track they came up with music that surged with electric smarts, roundhouse drum-pump and hooks atop hooks. It’s power pop that never lets up for a minute.
Initially billed as the biggest Vancouver supergroup that no one had heard of, the New Pornographers were burst to life fully formed on Mass Romantic. There’s three different vocalists competing for your attention here – Neko Case, A.C Newman and Dan Bejar all the while the band opts to throw everything into the same blender. What the New Pornographers excel at is making everything sound like a massive sugar rush with their voracious love of synths and guitars and catchy melodies. With Mass Romantic, the band proves themselves studious in their noted appreciation of the pop form and its classics but too hypercharged and frenetic to come across as retro. The highlights are many: The vocal harmonies on “Letter From An Occupant”! The way those brash synths build up and let loose on “Mystery Hours”! How it takes less than thirty seconds for the band to get to the chorus for “The Mary Martin Show”! The New Pornographers would scale greater heights in later albums and make big names out of everyone involved but Mass Romantic was where they thrillingly laid down the blueprint.
Ava Cherry was one of David Bowie’s backing vocalists (not to mention his girlfriend) during hisYoungAmericans soul-obsessed era, and the great man himself produced this album — unfortunately, however, Bowie’s subsequent wranglings with both manager and record company meant it never got a release. AvaCherry finally released it herself a few years back, and it’s a fascinating document of an fascinating era.
Before Bowie recorded the bulk of Diamond Dogs over three days in January 1974, he had been trying to get a “soul’” vocal trio off the ground. This was the Astronettes, who consisted of Bowie’s new girlfriend Ava Cherry, his longtime friend Geoff MacCormack (aka “Warren Peace”) and the unaffiliated Jason Guess.
Some of the surviving tracks were issued decades later and merit a listen if only out of curiosity, as some of Bowie’sAstronettes compositions are ancestors to his later songs. The promising (rhythmically, at least) “I Am Divine” is the first draft of Young Americans’ “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” “People From Bad Homes,” with a needling keyboard whistle for its main hook, seems bottom-drawer material. Bowie liked the title enough to use it in a later lyric, but seems to have discarded the rest of the song.
Bowie abandoned the project once Diamond Dogs took on steam, though he kept the Astronettes as his backing singers. He scrapped the proposed Astronettes record in part because of management-related shenanigans, but it was also obvious that the patchy material wasn’t commercially viable.
Musicians – Aynsley Dunbar, David Bowie, Herbie Flowers, Luis Ramirez , Mark Pritchard, Mike Garson
Analog Planet’s Michael Fremer reviewed our trio of Joe Jackson reissues and came away impressed: “As we’ve come to expect from Intervention, the Tip-on packaging is first rate as is Kevin Gray’s mastering from analog tape, pressed on 180 gram vinyl at RTI.” But wait there’s more! On “Look Sharp!” .. you’ll love the reissue, which offers sharper, cleaner transients, improved transparency and focus and greater dynamics. It preserves a pulsing energy the original softens and diminishes.” I’m the Man: “ … this Intervention reissue smokes the original in all of the ways that matter on a drum’n’bass’n’guitar driven record: sharper, cleaner transients, greater dynamic slam, and bass that digs all the way down.“Night and Day”… The Intervention reissue again beats the original A&M Records release in every way .
Joe Jackson’s “angry young man” stance came late in the cycle and so at the time was less than fully convincing. Elvis and Graham had already been there and done that. The picture of Jackson on the back cover of his debut Look Sharp (IR-005) just wasn’t convincing.
More importantly, the music and especially the lyrics seemed derivative but boy, could the band play and cut those sharp-edged rhythms! Songs like “Sunday Papers” covered familiar territory but the hook on “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” dug in and the songs were generally tightly sprung and well crafted though “Happy Loving Couples” sounded way too much like “Less Than Zero”. On the Reggae rhythmed “Fools in Love” Jackson is a cynical outsider looking at love from a particularly jaundiced and needy point of view. Overall, his social commentary lacked focus and bite, while his relationship songs came across as bitter. Jackson knew how to modulate the dynamics and exhibited a musical sense that indicated he was low-balling his abilities to fit the time’s stripped down ’50’s derived musical fashion.
Look Sharp! was simply but cleanly recorded in what sounds like mono. If you like the original, you’ll love the reissue, which offers sharper, cleaner transients, improved transparency and focus and greater dynamics. It preserves a pulsing energy the original softens and diminishes. Cymbals chime smartly, Graham Maby’s bass lines are tautly drawn, and Dave Haughton’s drum kit produces slam the original blunts. Plus the pressing quality helps produce blacker backgrounds.
Jackson’s follow-up “I’m The Man” features a cover showing Jackson as consummate flim-flam man and while the title song is about a material goods salesman, it can also be seen as Jackson getting ready to slough off the Get Sharp! “musical hula-hoops” image, though the title tune may be Jackson’s pinnacle as a hard rocker.
The album opens with “On the Radio”, a sweet revenge song that also indicates the production has softened and warmed somewhat the debut album’s hard and bright edges. In “Geraldine and John” Jackson cynically observes a cheater and a break-up. “Kinda Cute” again cuts too close to the bone of an Elvis Costello song. Later on “The Band Wore Blues Shirts”, which has in parenthesis (a true story), Jackson paints an empty picture of being a musician in a nightclub house band. In “Don’t Wanna Be Like That”, Jackson paints a negative picture of the L.A. scene from his particular point of view, again as an outsider. At the end his bitterness sharply pokes through his observational stance as he hints at his own predicament: “And the Playboy centerfold leaves me cold/And that ain’t ’cause I’m a fag”. The album’s final few songs are lyrically unfocused, or rather, inconsequential relationship observations as if Jackson’s attention span on the subject was spent—though “Amateur Hour” features a lovely melody.
Again, this Intervention reissue smokes the original in all of the ways that matter on a drum’n’bass’n’guitar driven record: sharper, cleaner transients, greater dynamic slam, and bass that digs all the way down. The perspective is again nearly if not fully mono, which increases the importance of the instrumental separation and clarity.
I’m the Man came across then and now as a “bridge” album to either more of the same next time, which would have been a career-stall, or something new demonstrating musical and personal growth. Still, probably few fans were prepared for Night and Day, where Jackson basically said “fuck this angry young man shit, here’s who I really am (musically and otherwise).”
On the front cover Jackson is seen at the piano (where he dared not previously go) in a Hirschfeld-like pen and ink sketch, looking very much like the Cole Porter toward which the album’s title points. The newly liberated Jackson is shown in the gatefold “deal with it” photo standing before a plethora of keyboard and mallet instruments—all percussion—plus a couple of bass guitars. Not an electric guitar in sight but plenty of latin rhythms packed into the grooves.
The album opens with Jackson stepping into a rhythmically sophisticated “Another World” backed by congas and xylophone. Jackson’s liberation continues song by song as he’s moved beyond “boy/girl” to more sophisticated fare. “Stepping Out” presents the newly liberated Jackson in full sophisticated flower but not before the embarrassing Talking Heads rip-off “T.V. Age”, which I bet Jackson wishes he could take back.
“Real Men” gets to the heart of where Jackson’s been heading—the sexual liberation and another dose of tearful bitterness because he’s not one of the pretty boys he’s observing and in any case, liberation is leading to confusion. It’s a powerful song and worlds away from “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”. It’s Jackson being really tough but without shouting and on the final tune you hear Jackson finally singing satisfied about his relationship instead of observing others—though he’s still got a bitch, but it’s about the club D.J..
The Intervention reissue again beats the original A&M in every way as above. I think Mobile Fidelity once issued this years ago and I had it but got rid of it I can’t remember why, but probably because the old Mo-Fi regime laid on the excess bass and muddied the middle.
Fans of these records will want all three but more casual fans looking for one should get Night and Day both for the music and far more sophisticated ‘recorded in New York City’ sound.
As we’ve come to expect from Intervention, the Tip-on packaging is first rate as is Kevin Gray’s mastering from analog tape, pressed on 180 gram vinyl at RTI.
Life out on the lonely road… It’s a tale that many musicians sing about, longing for a day they can actually come home from touring around the world, meeting faceless fans and playing show after show. It can get lonesome on tour, and yet, somehow, they can’t shed their vagabond ways.
But that’s not the case for Courtney Marie Andrews, who had toured in other people’s bands for a decade before taking a break to bartend in a small Washington town these past few years. Pushing pause on non-stop touring allowed her to sit back and re-evaluate, sparking the thesis for the album “Honest Life” via Fat Possum Records, with a pressing of the deluxe edition. At 16, Andrews left her Arizona home to become transient, playing and busking in bars and cafes around the country. She continued on as a session singer and touring musician for nearly 40 artists, from Jimmy Eat World to Damien Jurado.Her work took her all around the world, but at some point, she realized she’d lost touch with reality.“You can start to just stop calling people or stop keeping up with the people that you know and love,” Andrews said, calling from an unseasonably warm Seattle. “All of a sudden it’s been three years and you haven’t seen them.”In Washington, Andrews made connections again, getting to know people at the bar and laying down tracks for Honest Life with a trusted group of musicians. Together, the band sounds like home. Drums chug away at moderate paces, piano glitters organically over top and the guitars are cozy. In the final track, she even added a somber arrangement of strings, gifted by her friend Andrew Joslyn.Over the majority of the album, a pedal steel guitar drifts lazily under the melody, tangling with Andrews’ voice. With her Emmylou Harris-like pipes and the pedal steel, the album is what some people have called “country.”“When I went in to make Honest Life, I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I’m making a country record,’” Andrews said. “It’s more about creating a timeless sound. Something that can be released now or in the ’60s or whenever… I take pleasure in being a songwriter and creating a record that’s hard to place where it’s from.”
Honest Life is technically her sixth album, although she’s kept the first three for herself. It’s her first LP on a label. The album has made several best-of-lists, The accolades couldn’t have come at a better time, she said, when she was wiser about the industry and had gotten some time to grow.
Some people get lucky and their first record is just like a masterpiece fully formed, but that was definitely not me,” Andrews said. “I feel like I’ve really come into my own as a songwriter in the past few years. … I’m glad [the recognition] happened now when I’m a good songwriter, rather than when I was young.”To improve her craft, Andrews studied up on the greats—Neil Young, Bob Dylan, etc.—and in turn, she gained notice from other impressive songwriters, like Ryan Adams and Jurado. With practice and careful observation of legends and her contemporaries, she perfected the “tasteful way of revealing things” in her music.“When I was younger, I would write a song and I would reveal things in every single line, and that was the problem,” Andrews said. “We don’t need to know all that. The listener is overwhelmed. It’s like when you’re at a bar and somebody’s telling you their life story and you’re like, ‘Whoa, calm down.’”
Andrews’ songwriting is more subtle now, but not cryptic. The first track, “Rookie Dreaming,” reflects on her troubadour life and the missteps of what Andrews calls “blind youth.”
“I was moving too fast to see / All the paintings in Paris or sunrise in Barcelona / I was too broke too shallow to dive deep / Too busy carrying the weight of everything,” Andrews sings, her voice rife with mild vibrato, swooping with a twang that’s not Southern, but something unique altogether. She punches syllables that condemn her apathetic lifestyle—“TOO broke, TOO shallow”— while letting other verses flow freely, warm with harmony.
While she criticizes herself in “Rookie Dreaming,” she turns her perspective to address a meek friend in “Irene.” She sings directly to the title character, a pseudonym for the real-life subject, delivering the type of constructive criticism you might not have the guts to give to a friend’s face.
“Gain some confidence, Irene / If you speak let your voice ring out / But keep your grace, Irene / Don’t go falling in love with yourself,” she sings. An organ warbles as Andrews delivers her sermon.
“‘Irene’ was originally written for a friend, but I feel like probably every growing, youthful woman has felt like Irene at one point or the other,” Andrews said. “Every woman who’s amazing but doesn’t really know it yet. We feel like all these magazines and articles that are saying, ‘No, we’re not good enough’ … It’s sort of realizing that that’s total bullshit and you are awesome and you just have to know it.”
Not only did Andrews take care of all the songwriting on Honest Life, but she was the sole producer on the album—essential for keeping control in the studio.
“With this record, I knew so clearly what I wanted that I didn’t want distractions or arguments,” Andrews said. “One person sees it one way, one person sees it another way. Sometimes it makes a great record, but for Honest Life, I just wanted the sort of clear, easy, raw and realness. And that’s what we did.”
As for settling down and slinging drinks, Andrews knew that wouldn’t last forever. She said she’s always going to travel in the name of music. But this time, she’s not going to be singing anyone else’s songs. She’s at center stage now, and she’s ready to brave the lonely road once more.
“A lot of Honest Life was realizing that I didn’t want to tour as a backup singer anymore,” Andrews said. “If was going to be on the road, it was going to be for me, for my songs, for the dreams that I’ve always had as a teenager and as a young adult. Bartending is not my career path. Music is everything.”
It’s a common trajectory for musicians to start out sounding tentative and insecure, only to later bloom into battle-tested, fully formed talents. That’s surely been Sharon Van Etten’s story, as she’s transitioned from a quavering solo artist into a muscular rock ‘n’ roll front woman — the kind you’d see stalking festival stages.
But Van Etten’s 2009 debut, because i was in love, doesn’t actually sound tentative or insecure. Instead, it functions as a sort of concept album about tentativeness and insecurity — about examining tiny interpersonal details until they become all-encompassing. From the album’s very first words — “I wish I knew what to do with you / But the truth is, I ain’t got a clue” she’s at a loss for answers, yet mindful of the million tiny signals and mixed messages that keep her up at night.
In “Much More Than That,” Van Etten’s opening plea (“Please don’t take me lightly”) introduces a song in which she strains to be heard in a relationship, and gets left with no choice but to magnify the impact of touches and glances: “My toe hit your toe lightly / Your toe met my heel right back / And I don’t think I need much more than that.” But, viewed next to the more assertive albums that succeeded it, because i was in love snaps into focus as an album about learning how much more she does need — and how much she deserves.
In light of the success that also followed, it makes sense that because i was in love would get the remixed-and-remastered deluxe-reissue treatment, complete with two lovely bonus tracks (“I’m Giving Up On You,” “You Didn’t Really Do That”) and the parenthetical title revision (it was) to re-frame the album in hindsight. It captures a sound Sharon Van Etten has since left behind, but it remains radiant, universal and utterly timeless.
On the inside of the original gatefold is the following statement: “This album was compiled from live performances recorded in cities throughout the United States between August 1969 and June 1970. Aside from the editing necessary to assemble the music into album form, the recording is an organic documentary and absolutely live!”
However according to Paul Rothchild, the band’s long time producer, the album had to be virtually stitched together from numerous performances, simply because he couldn’t get complete takes of any of the songs, and therefore had to do a lot of splicing and editing to create a necessary master. Yet when the surviving band members eventually began opening the vaults, releasing these shows in far more complete form, they would prove to utterly contradict Rothchild’s claim that “There must have been 2000 edits on that album”. In fact it turns out that not only was each performance left relatively intact, but that the majority of songs selected were recorded over two nights at The Felt Forum, in January 1970.
We begin with the emcee imploring the crowd, who are chanting “we want The Doors”, to “sit down and go back to your seats”, lest the local fire authorities decide to cancel the show. It’s a terrific way to draw the listener in, creating a sense of actually being in the audience, capturing that sense of excitement and anticipation which must have been rippling through those in attendance.
Instead of “Roadhouse Blues” or some other popular number, they choose to open the set with a powerful and particularly psychedelic cover of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love”, thanks mainly to Robby Krieger’s hallucinatory slide guitar and Manzarek’s acid-Baroque keyboards. Next is a tune that I’m sure was close to JimMorrison’s heart, “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)”, before seamlessly segueing into a raw and dirty “Back DoorMan”, during which Morrison slips in a few verses of “Love Hides”, a song the band never recorded much less attempted to complete based on what we have here. The medley concludes with an urgent, almost primordial reading of “Five to One”, a call to arms if there ever was, although something tells me that by 1970 Jim had become weary of the whole ‘rock prophet’ phenomenon.
The bluesy “Build Me A Woman” portends the sort of style of song writing the band would go on to explore further with L.A. Woman, the band’s final LP with Morrison. Now if you need to go to the toilet, I recommend that the listener do so immediately before the epic, majestically dark and twisted “When the Music’s Over” kicks off. Through headphones one can discern the odd subtle edit here and there, no doubt due to the limits of vinyl. Well, either that or Rothchild made an executive decision in cutting out a minute or two of music he felt was superfluous to a piece that already runs for nearly fifteen minutes.
The band perform a rather perfunctory rendition of Willie Dixon’s “Close to You”, with Ray Manzarek on lead vocals (for better or worse), followed by “Universal Mind”, a sort of pop-jazz number, on which Morrison expresses the lyrics in seemingly half-interested fashion. Jim manages to offend half the Catholic diocese with his introduction to “Break On Through (to the Other Side)”, and while the band are playing at full tilt, apart from the poetry and theatrics, I somehow get the feeling Jim just wasn’t into it anywhere near as much as he was a couple years earlier. Still, it remains an exciting example of rock at its atavistic best.
Whether the listener can sit through the entirety of “Celebration of the Lizard” obviously depends on the extent of one’s devotion to all things Doors, not to mention level of tolerance, because at more than fourteen minutes in length, you’re going to need a lot of it (either that or a lot of drugs). A studio version was attempted though discarded during the making of Waiting For The Sun, and probably for good reason. Most of it is little more than poetry as performance art, and the sort of ‘poetry-meets-music’ experimentation that would ultimately inspire Patti Smith, another rebel poet of rock. Manzarek himself put it rather pointedly in his autobiography: “(Jim) loved his confrontational theatre. And then the idea struck him. He was going to confront his audiences with these cries for freedom.”
Morrison’s vocals are a touch shaky (disinterested?) on “Soul Kitchen”, the album’s final song, although no less engaging for it. Obviously the scotch and ciggies had by then begun to take their toll, or maybe it was a symptom of Jim’s very soul, or overall state of mind.
Apart from the odd dodgy bootleg, until the 1990’s live albums by the Doors were something of a rarity. There was The Hollywood Bowl (all fifteen minutes of it), and the excellent Alive She Cried, released in 1983, but that was about it – meaning that Absolutely Live was for many years the most authoritative document of what it was like to be at one of their concerts, and about the closest someone of my generation was ever going to get.
Even on their first album, these Brooklyn-via-Minneapolis dudes had it all: drugs, sex, Catholic guilt, trashy bar-band guitars. Craig Finn splutters his crazed one-liners about killer parties gone bad, from “Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix” to “I did a couple favors for these guys who looked like Tusken Raiders.” “Certain Songs” pays tribute to a bar where the jukebox has the perfect ratio of Meat Loaf to Billy Joel. Commercial? Not exactly. Yet the Hold Steady sounded so real and raw, so loaded with wit and compassion and energy, this made them a word-of-mouth sensation.
To celebrate the release of deluxe remastered editions of ALMOST KILLED ME and SEPARATION SUNDAY, all of the members of The Hold Steady share their memories from recording the band’s first two albums, with added insight from others involved in making the first two records in this podcast series.
Part One features a conversation between Craig Finn & Tad Kubler, founders and lead songwriters.
Come back this Friday for part two with Galen Polivka – and remember, both albums are available Now on LP/CD/Digital! Order at http://www.theholdsteady.net#
The long-awaited release of the deluxe editions of our first two LPs are available on Frenchkiss Records! The Deluxe Edition LPs mark the first time both albums have been available on vinyl in more than a decade.
ALMOST KILLED ME: DELUXE EDITION comes joined with five rare tracks, including the very first Hold Steady 7” single, “Milkcrate Mosh,” and songs previously only available on the album’s original Australian CD release. It’s on blue vinyl.
SEPARATION SUNDAY: DELUXE EDITION features six additional tracks, including the never before available “212-Margarita” and “The Most Important Thing” along with previously unreleased demos of “Cattle and the Creeping Things,” “Charlemagne in Sweatpants,” and “Crucifixion Cruise.” It’s on white vinyl.
All extras are available on the Deluxe Edition CD releases and via vinyl download cards.
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